Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
JAMES BALDWINIt was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
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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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Please 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.
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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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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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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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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
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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
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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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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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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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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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Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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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 victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN