Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES BALDWINPeople can cry much easier than they can change.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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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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No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
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If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody
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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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We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them.
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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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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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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 impossible is the least that one can demand.
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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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You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
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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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The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
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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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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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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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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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
JAMES BALDWIN