James A. 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.

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.

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 love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.