If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
JAMES BALDWINEveryone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
More James Baldwin Quotes
-
-
The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
JAMES BALDWIN -
If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody
JAMES BALDWIN -
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
JAMES BALDWIN -
People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
JAMES BALDWIN -
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
JAMES BALDWIN -
It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.
JAMES BALDWIN -
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
JAMES BALDWIN