J.F. Baldwin Quotes
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.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
Writing bridges the inner and outer worlds and connects the paths of action and reflection.
We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.
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.
For better or ill, I was very heavily influenced by men I knew who always dressed formally.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
The rule of law in place of force, always basic to my thinking, now takes on a new relevance in a world where, if war is to go, only law can replace it.
I wanted to be president of the United States. I really did. The older I get, the less preposterous the idea seems.
In the theater, you act more of the time. In the movies, you get to act maybe 20 or 30 minutes of the day. I love acting in movies. It's just different.
Had the employers of past generations all of them dealt fairly with their men there would have been no unions.
I always felt from the beginning that you had to defend people you disliked and feared as well as those you admired.
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
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.
All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge.
The mark of a top player is not how much he wins when he is winning but how he handles his losses.
I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
A caged canary is secure; but it is not free. It is easier for free men to resist terrorism from afar than tyranny from within.
I don't need to be married to Georgia O'Keeffe or Lillian Hellman, but I like being with a woman I can look up to.
I am not struck so much by the diversity of testimony as by the many-sidedness of truth.
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
I would never do another sitcom. It was so boring I wanted to pull my fingernails off.
Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.
There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
When I was a little boy in Worcestershire reading history books I never thought I should have to interfere between a king and his mistress.
When I told my parents, 'I'm going to be an actor,' they screamed and wept and freaked out.
Not a lot of individuals get to refer to the Lord in their prayers as 'Dude', but he's doing a new thing with me.
Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.
It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.
If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.
To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.
There should be a name for the syndrome that occurs when you're in Paris and you already miss it.
