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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.

James A. Baldwin

Related Topics

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More James A. Baldwin Quotes

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  The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

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• 

  You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

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• 

  If 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.

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• 

  A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

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  To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

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• 

  There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

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• 

  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]

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• 

  Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.

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• 

  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.

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• 

  The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

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• 

  When the South has trouble with its Negroes – when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” – it blames “outside agitators” and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.

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• 

  You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

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• 

  There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

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• 

  Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.

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• 

  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.

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• 

  You write in order to change the world.

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