Top 391 Quotes & Sayings by James Baldwin
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer James Baldwin.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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.
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
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.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
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.
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
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.
The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
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 the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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 responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
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.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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.
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 most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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.
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
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.
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
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.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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.
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
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.
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
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.
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.
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.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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.
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 world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
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.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
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.
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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