J.F. Baldwin Quotes

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

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.

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.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

I almost died, secretly, behind closed doors.

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.

In terms of instilling the values of mental toughness and work ethic, discipline is the gift that keeps on giving.

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.

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.

The U.S. routinely ranks lower than other countries in health outcomes such as infant mortality.

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

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

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

Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.

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.

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.

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

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

If the word 'integration' means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

I would say that social work began in my mind in the Unitarian Church when I was ten or twelve years old, and I started to do things that I thought would help other people.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

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.

Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.

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

Every time we sit down to eat, we make a choice. Please choose vegetarianism. Do it for animals. Do it for the environment and do it for your health.

I learned in an extremely hard way that the accountability falls with me.

The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

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.

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.

I believe as a born-again Christian that once you've had a chance to drink from the well, it becomes your responsibility to replenish the well.

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

It is time for the world, the hemisphere and the region to make sure that relevant institutions of civil society and relevant laws are embedded in the mechanisms of governance.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching.

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