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 BALDWINPeople who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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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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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.
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Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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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 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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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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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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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
JAMES BALDWIN






