There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
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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Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES BALDWIN -
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
JAMES BALDWIN -
You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
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Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
JAMES BALDWIN -
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWIN