People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
JAMES BALDWINThe victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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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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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
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You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
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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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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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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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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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
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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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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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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.
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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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You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
JAMES BALDWIN