If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
JAMES BALDWINIf a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
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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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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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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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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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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.
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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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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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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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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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Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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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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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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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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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
JAMES BALDWIN