J.F. Baldwin Quotes
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
Fiction. . . . It's like goading a mongoose and a cobra into battle and staying with them to see who wins.
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.
The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
I would rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck.
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
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
I've always thought that the most perfect fate which could befall any woman would be to be born a rich widow.
As empty vessels make the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest blabbers
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
Loving Jesus is what's most important to me. I know it sounds hokey, but it's the truth.
I have always felt that the moment when first you wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours.
To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.
Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.
You cannot contribute anything to the ideal condition of mind and heart known as Brotherhood, however much you preach, posture, or agree, unless you live it.
A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better if he had never lived.
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.
When you’re stuck in a spiral, to change all aspects of the spin you need only to change one thing.
There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.
I cannot consistently, with self respect, do other than I have, namely, to deliberately violate an act which seems to me to be a denial of everything which ideally and in practice I hold sacred.
Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.
To be in this business and have tremendous integrity and only make distinguished choices is very tough.
In my belief, a harvest is also a legacy, for very often what you reap is, in the way of small miracles, more than you consciously know you have sown.
New York City is a mismanaged carnival of stupidity that is desperate for revenue and anxious to criminalize behavior once thought benign.
I think it's really terrifying that a country based on the foundations and ideals of God, is now systematically removing God from everything. Everything!
