The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
JAMES BALDWINLove brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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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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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 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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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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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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You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
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Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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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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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
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Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
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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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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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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.
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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.
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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
JAMES BALDWIN