Literature is indispensable to the world.
JAMES BALDWINNot everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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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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History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
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It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.
JAMES BALDWIN -
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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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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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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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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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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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.
JAMES BALDWIN






