James A. Baldwin quotes:

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  • Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

  • 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.

  • If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

  • The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

  • To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

  • I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

  • Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

  • When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

  • The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

  • There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

  • The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

  • I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

  • Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

  • Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

  • To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

  • There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

  • Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

  • Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

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

  • American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

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

  • 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.

  • No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

  • People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

  • The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

  • Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

  • The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

  • The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

  • Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.

  • Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

  • Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.

  • One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

  • The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

  • If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

  • The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

  • It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.

  • A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.

  • Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

  • Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

  • Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

  • Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

  • Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.

  • Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

  • The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.

  • Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

  • Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty...the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent humanity, the mark of cruelty.

  • If the word integration means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it

  • A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

  • It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

  • I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

  • The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden - as an unpatriotic act - that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood

  • It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

  • Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.

  • All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

  • Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

  • I can't be a pessimist, because I am alive.

  • Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

  • Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

  • 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

  • Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

  • Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

  • James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.

  • Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

  • I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed; all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.

  • I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

  • It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.

  • Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.

  • The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

  • Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

  • Sentimentality , the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

  • It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

  • Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.

  • It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

  • Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

  • Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

  • People can cry much easier than they can change.

  • The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

  • When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

  • The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

  • It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

  • Words like 'freedom', 'justice' and 'democracy' are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous, and above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

  • A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

  • The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

  • But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

  • Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

  • The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

  • People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.

  • 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

  • People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

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

  • It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

  • The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

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

  • Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

  • Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

  • The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.

  • You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

  • I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

  • To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

  • Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person - ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

  • I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.

  • One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.

  • If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.

  • The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

  • It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

  • 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.

  • This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.

  • When Americans look out on the world, they see nothing but dark and menacing strangers who appear to have no sense of rhythm at all, nor any respect or affection for white people; and white Americans really do not know what to make of all this, except to increase the defense budget.

  • You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who 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 ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.

  • We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution. Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go.

  • Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

  • People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

  • What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.

  • I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason... Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are.

  • For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

  • Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.

  • It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

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