Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWINTo be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
More James Baldwin Quotes
-
-
If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody
JAMES BALDWIN -
We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Everybody’s journey is individual.
JAMES BALDWIN -
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
JAMES BALDWIN -
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
JAMES BALDWIN -
I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
JAMES BALDWIN -
No man is a devil in his own mind.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN -
There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWIN -
You write in order to change the world, if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Artists are here to disturb the peace.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Literature is indispensable to the world.
JAMES BALDWIN -
There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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 -
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
JAMES BALDWIN