James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 3

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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.

At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.

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

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.

Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.

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

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

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me and smiled and said, "Whose little boy are you?"

The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

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

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

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

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

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

I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

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

When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.

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

The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

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.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

Recognizing a problem doesn't always bring a solution, but until we recognize that problem, there can be no solution.

After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

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

To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

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.

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.

I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?

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