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 BALDWINPeople are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
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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.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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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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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
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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.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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Everybody’s journey is individual.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN