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.
JAMES BALDWINThose 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.
JAMES BALDWINThe power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
JAMES BALDWINI can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES BALDWINPlease 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.
JAMES BALDWINThere 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.
JAMES BALDWINLove was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWINTo be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
JAMES BALDWINEducation is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
JAMES BALDWINFor nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
JAMES BALDWINLiterature is indispensable to the world.
JAMES BALDWINYou have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
JAMES BALDWINThe world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES BALDWINYou were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
JAMES BALDWINConfusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.
JAMES BALDWINThere is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
JAMES BALDWINThe most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES BALDWIN