For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
JAMES BALDWINYou were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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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.
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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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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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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.
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People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.
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Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
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Everybody’s journey is individual.
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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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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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
JAMES BALDWIN