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. BALDWINIf 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
-
-
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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 -
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Hatred destroys the person who hates.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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. BALDWIN -
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.
JAMES A. BALDWIN