For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.
JAMES BALDWINYou think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.
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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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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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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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We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them.
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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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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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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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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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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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Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
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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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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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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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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 few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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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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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.
JAMES BALDWIN