James Baldwin Quotes

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.

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.

For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.