Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
JAMES BALDWINPeople can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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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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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
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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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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
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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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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN