All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
JAMES BALDWINThere are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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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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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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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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Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
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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 price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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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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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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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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Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark.
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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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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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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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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 purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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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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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
JAMES BALDWIN