I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES BALDWINThere are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
More James Baldwin Quotes
-
-
People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
JAMES BALDWIN -
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
JAMES BALDWIN -
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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 -
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
JAMES BALDWIN -
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.
JAMES BALDWIN -
There 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.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Everybody’s journey is individual.
JAMES BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES BALDWIN