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 BALDWINPeople 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.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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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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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.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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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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The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
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The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
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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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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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Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
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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.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES BALDWIN