J.F. Baldwin Quotes

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.

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

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.

It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.

No man is a devil in his own mind.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

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

If Obama was white, he’d be up by 17 points.

God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.

Evolution isn't true, because if we evolved from monkeys, how can they still be here?

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

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

This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

You cannot fix what you will not face.

I can't be a pessimist, because I am alive.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

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.

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

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.

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.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

Dictatorship is like a giant beech-tree - very magnificent to look at in its prime, but nothing grows underneath it.

Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

Sometimes there is a greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence.

What makes humility so desirable is the marvelous thing it does to us; it creates in us a capacity for the closest possible intimacy with God.

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

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

I just consider myself a piece of the puzzle and I'm lucky enough to be asked or invited to the party, if you will. I hope I can bring some laughs and grimaces to the fans.

Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down with incredible swiftness.

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

Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.

I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.

Artists are here to disturb the peace.

In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.

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

Wonder is not a Pollyanna stance, not a denial of reality; wonder is an acknowledgement of the power of the mind to transform, to notice, to decide what experience shall mean.

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

The dualism itself becomes a sort of presupposition or datum; its terms condition the further problem.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.

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

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.