The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
JAMES BALDWINTrue rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
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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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Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
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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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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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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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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN