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Baldwin James Quotes & Sayings

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Top Baldwin James Quotes

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

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. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

You cannot fix what you will not face. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

I guess it can't be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they're making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks - the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Life, it is true, is a process of decisions and alternatives, the conscious awareness and acceptance of limitations. Experience, nevertheless, to say nothing of history, seems clearly to indicate that it is not possible to banish or to falsify any human need without ourselves undergoing falsification and loss. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

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

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. I — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

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. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

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. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

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

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

People can cry much easier than they can change. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead. "I'm going, Ma," she said. "I got to go. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death
ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Yet it is only when one is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream one has long cherished, or a privilege one has long possessed, that one is set free ... that one has set oneself free, for higher dreams, for greater privileges. James Baldwin — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other's faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other's only hope. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic - a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By Zadie Smith

She struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experiences the profound isolation and loenliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world. — Zadie Smith

Baldwin James Quotes By Roland Merullo

Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. - James Baldwin — Roland Merullo

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

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. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

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. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Why am I going home? he asked himself. But he knew why. It was time. In order not to lose all that he had gained, he had to move forward and risk it all. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

It was as though I were yelling up to Heaven and Heaven would not hear me. And if Heaven would not hear me- to wash me, to make me clean- then utter disaster was my portion. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Furthermore, it is now absolutely clear that white people are a minority in the world - so severe a minority that they now look rather more like an invention - and that they cannot possibly hope to rule it any longer. If this is so, why is it not also possible that they achieved their original dominance by stealth and cunning and bloodshed and in opposition to the will of Heaven, and not, as they claim, by Heaven's will? — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

The necessity, then, of those "lesser breeds without the law" - those wogs, barbarians, niggers - is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply "spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again," leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

If I could make you stay, I would,' he shouted. 'If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you - if I could make you stay, I would.' He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his finger at me, grotesquely playful. 'One day, perhaps, you will wish I had. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

What kind of friendship have you had?
Or for that matter ... what kind of love affairs? — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

It's always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Mark Baldwin

In Socrates' thought the two marks of individual self-consciousness appear; it is practical and it is social. — James Mark Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

All racists are irresponsible. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

I remember what it was ... to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

We live in a nation of pigs and murderers. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

And what the white students had not expected to let themselves in for, when boarding the Freedom Train, was the realisation that the black situation in America was but one aspect of the fraudulent nature of American life. They had not expected to be forced to judge their parents, their elders, and their antecedents, so harshly, and they had not realised how cheaply, after all, the rulers of the republic held their white lives to be. Coming to the defence of the rejected and the destitute, they were confronted with the extent of their own alienation, and the unimaginable dimensions of their own poverty. They were privileged and secure only so long as they did, in effect, what they were told: but they had been raised to believe that they were free. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

All that befell: in her joys, her pipe in the evening, her man at night, the children she suckled, and guided on their first short steps; and in her tribulations, death, and parting, and the lash, she did not forget that deliverance was promised and would surely come. She had only to endure and trust in God. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Mark Baldwin

The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology. — James Mark Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

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. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Because only an artist can tell and only an artist have told, since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone that gets this planet, to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die, what it is like to fear death, what is it like to fear, what it is like to love, what it is like to be glad. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

How can one... dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power? — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

You can't see yourself all over. But I can. Part of you is honey, part of you is copper, some of you is gold
James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Love him,' said Jacques, with vehemence, 'love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty - they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better - forever - if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.' He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. 'You play it safe long enough,' he said, in a different tone, 'and you'll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever - like me. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

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

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Come out, come out, wherever you are! — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch - I hoped to drive out fire with fire. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

She, who had descended with such joy and pain, had begun her upward climb - upward, with her baby, on the steep, steep side of the mountain. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

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. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

And her mother still struggled in these white kitchens in town, humming sweet hymns, tiny, mild eyed and bent, her father still labored on the oyster boats; after a lifetime of labor, should they drop dead tomorrow, there would not be a penny for their burial clothes. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge - revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior argument and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation. It abruptly reduces the white enemy to a contest merely physical, which he can win only physically. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

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

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

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

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

The trick is to love somebody ... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

Hatred destroys the person who hates. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two undefined and currently undefinable proper nouns. I mean that, in the case of Africa, Africa is still chained to Europe, and exploited by Europe, and Europe and America are chained together; and as long as this is so, it is hard to speak of Africa except as a cradle and a potential. Not until the many millions of people on the continent of Africa control their land and their resources will the African personality flower or genuinely African institutions flourish and reveal Africa as she is. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

When my fingers began, involuntarily, to loose their hold on Hella, I realized that I was dangling from a high place and that I had been clinging to her for my very life. With each moment, as my fingers slipped, I felt the roaring air beneath me and felt everything in me bitterly contracting, crawling furiously upward against that long fall. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

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. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

Employment is my right my destiny. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

If you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty- they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one
you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played - and play - in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know. The — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Time is always now. Everybody who has ever thought about his own life knows this. You don't make resolutions about something you are going to do next year. No! You decide to write a book: the book may be finished twenty years from now, but you've got to start it now. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Not a thousand years ago, it was illegal to teach a slave to read. Not a thousand years ago, the Supreme Court decided that separate could not be equal. And today, as we sit here, no one is learning anything in this country. You see a nation which is the leader of the rest of the world, that had to pay the price of that ticket, and the price of that ticket is we're sitting in the most illiterate nation in the world. THE MOST ILLITERATE NATION IN THE WORLD. A monument to illiteracy. And if you doubt me, all you have to do is spend a day in Washington. I am serious as a heart attack. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

You go into a book and you're in the dark, really. You go in with a certain fear and trembling. You know one thing. You know you will not be the same person when this voyage is over. But you don't know what's going to happen to you between getting on the boat and stepping off. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

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. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

But the Negro's experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

It is a terrible, an inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

But it's not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can't forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the world forever. It's not possible to forget anybody you've destroyed. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

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. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James A. Baldwin

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. — James A. Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. — James Baldwin

Baldwin James Quotes By Michael Eric Dyson

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this. — Michael Eric Dyson

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

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

Baldwin James Quotes By James Baldwin

Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? — James Baldwin