James Baldwin quotes:

I moved, looking for a cigarette. They were in my hand. I lit one. In a moment, I thought, I will say something. I will say something and then I will walk out of this room forever.

I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden...I wonder why.

It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

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.

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

Elisha,' he said, 'no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember - please remember - I was saved. I was there.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

Whose little boy are you?

No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.

Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.

... I thought she would be fun to have fun with.

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.

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

We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

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

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.

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

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.

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.

Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

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.

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

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.

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

A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

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.

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.

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.

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.