Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
JAMES BALDWINThe world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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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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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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You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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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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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
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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.
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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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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.
JAMES BALDWIN