People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
JAMES BALDWINYou write in order to change the world, if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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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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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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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.
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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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.
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Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
JAMES BALDWIN