It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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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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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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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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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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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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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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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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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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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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Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
JAMES BALDWIN