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.
JAMES BALDWINIt 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.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.
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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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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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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 most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
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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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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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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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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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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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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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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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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN