The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES BALDWINYou don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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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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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 price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
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The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
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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.
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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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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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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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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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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN