James Baldwin Quotes

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

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

People can cry much easier than they can change.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

...they ain't never met nobody they didn't lie to and steal from.

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

We live in a nation of pigs and murderers.

You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.

We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.

People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility. (p. 81)

I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.

Sin is the only heritage of the natural man...

I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.

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

All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.

The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them.

Experience which destroys innocence also leads one back to it.

This world is white no longer and it will never be white again.

It is a great shock at the age of 5 or 6 to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

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.

Ain't no such thing as a little fault or a big fault. Satan get his foot in the door, he ain't going to rest till he's in the room. You is in the Word or you ain't--ain't no halfway with God.

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

...all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me...

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening.

All that hatred down there, " he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.