James A. Baldwin Quotes

There was no room in God's army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God's will. Let the church cry amen to this!

The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.

All racists are irresponsible.

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.

I will no longer take anyone's word for my experience.

Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.

Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.

All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.

We can make America what America must become.

Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.

When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

Recognizing a problem doesn't always bring a solution, but until we recognize that problem, there can be no solution.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.

Man cannot live by profit alone.

A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.

I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.

It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

Hatred destroys the person who hates.

It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.

At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

When the book comes out it may hurt you - but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.

A man's balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.

If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.

The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.

I really do believe in the New Jerusalem. I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous and people are not yet willing to pay it.

The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.

In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.

One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.

The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.