The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
JAMES BALDWINIf 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
More James Baldwin Quotes
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To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
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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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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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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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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.
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You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
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The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
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You 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.
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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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.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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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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It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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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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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.
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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
JAMES BALDWIN