If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
JAMES BALDWINTrust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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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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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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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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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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Everybody’s journey is individual.
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If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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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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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.
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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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People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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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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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
JAMES BALDWIN