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James Baldwin
Quotes by James Baldwin
Quotes by James Baldwin
“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.”
James Baldwin
“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
James Baldwin
“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.”
James Baldwin
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
James Baldwin
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
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
“Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.”
James Baldwin
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
James Baldwin
“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.”
James Baldwin
“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.”
James Baldwin
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
James Baldwin
“Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?”
James Baldwin
“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.”
James Baldwin
“I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.”
James Baldwin
“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.”
James 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 Baldwin
“It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
James Baldwin
“No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.”
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
“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”
James Baldwin
“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.”
James Baldwin
“Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”
James Baldwin
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
James Baldwin
“A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.”
James Baldwin
“The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.”
James Baldwin
“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.”
James Baldwin
“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.”
James Baldwin
“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
James Baldwin
“When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.”
James Baldwin
“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”
James Baldwin
