If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
JAMES BALDWINNeither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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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 are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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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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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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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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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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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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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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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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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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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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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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There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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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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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
JAMES BALDWIN