American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
JAMES BALDWINHistory is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.
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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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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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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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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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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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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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
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Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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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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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
JAMES BALDWIN






