You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWINNakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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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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No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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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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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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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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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
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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