James Baldwin Quotes
50. “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.”
49. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. 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.”
48. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
47. “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
46. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
45. “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.”
44. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”
43. “Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
42. “All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
41. “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.”
40. “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
39. “People can cry much easier than they can change.”
38. “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.”
37. “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
36. “I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
35. “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.”
34. “True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life.”
33. “Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.”
32. “It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
31. “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
30. “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.”
29. “People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great
difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
28. “To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”
27. “You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
26. “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
25. “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.”
24. “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.”
23. “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.”
22. “Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”
21. “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.”
20. “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.”
19. “Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”
18. “Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”
17. “Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.”
16. “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
15. “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
14. “The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”
13. “No man is a devil in his own mind.”
12. “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.”
11. “The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”
10. “You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
9. “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.”
8. “Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.”
7. “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
6. “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.”
5. “Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore”
4. “Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”
3. “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”
2. “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.”
1. “You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.”
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