For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
JAMES BALDWINIt is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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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People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.
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There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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There 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.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
JAMES BALDWIN