You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
JAMES BALDWINAll I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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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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The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
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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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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
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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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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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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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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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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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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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Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
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Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
JAMES BALDWIN