The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
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 world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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You write in order to change the world, if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWIN






