It 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.
JAMES BALDWINOur crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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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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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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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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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 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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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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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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Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.
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Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
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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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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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Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
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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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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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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 is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
JAMES BALDWIN