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.
JAMES BALDWINThose who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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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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People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.
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Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
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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 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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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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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History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
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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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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
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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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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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Everybody’s journey is individual.
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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.
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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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Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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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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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
JAMES BALDWIN