The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
JAMES BALDWINFreedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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Everyone 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.
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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Everybody’s journey is individual.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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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.
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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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The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.
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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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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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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.
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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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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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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.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
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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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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
JAMES BALDWIN