It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
JAMES BALDWINThere 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.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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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.
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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 was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
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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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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.
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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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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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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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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN