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.
JAMES BALDWINIf you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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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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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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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We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them.
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
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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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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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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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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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 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 world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.
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You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN