The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWINThe price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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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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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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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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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
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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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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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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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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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It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWIN