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.
JAMES BALDWINIt is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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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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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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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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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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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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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 can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
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Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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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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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
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The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
JAMES BALDWIN






