Top 391 Quotes & Sayings by James Baldwin - Page 2

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.

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 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.

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

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.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world.

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 comes as a great shock…to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance…has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.

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.

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

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

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.

The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

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.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

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.

We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.

A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

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

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

Words like "freedom," "justice," "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.

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.

You cannot fix what you will not face.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

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.

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.

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.

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

... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

Artists are here to disturb the peace.

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

The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.

The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

For nothing is fixed, 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 moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

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.

In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.