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.
JAMES BALDWINEducation is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
More James Baldwin Quotes
-
-
Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
JAMES BALDWIN -
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
JAMES BALDWIN -
There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
JAMES BALDWIN -
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Literature is indispensable to the world.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWIN -
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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 BALDWIN -
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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
JAMES BALDWIN -
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
JAMES BALDWIN -
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES BALDWIN -
I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
JAMES BALDWIN