The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
JAMES BALDWINThe power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
JAMES BALDWINTrust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
JAMES BALDWINThe impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWINPeople can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
JAMES BALDWINThere are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
JAMES BALDWINLiterature is indispensable to the world.
JAMES BALDWINThere are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
JAMES BALDWINThe world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES BALDWINIf a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.
JAMES BALDWINMost 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.
JAMES BALDWINI am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
JAMES BALDWINAnyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWINThe place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
JAMES BALDWINYou think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWINFor nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
JAMES BALDWINThe world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
JAMES BALDWIN