The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.
JAMES A. BALDWINIf the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
-
-
There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life — without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one–you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
A devotion to humanity is… too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
JAMES A. BALDWIN