James Arthur Baldwin (1924–87) was an American novelist and civil-rights activist. He achieved international recognition for his bold expressions of the predicament and aspirations of African American life in the 1950s and 1960s.
Born in Harlem, New York City, Baldwin started preaching in revivalist churches at the age of 14. This experience inspired his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1954.) Baldwin wrote it with the help of the African-American writer Richard Wright. Set in Harlem, it was semi-autobiographical and became an American classic.
Go Tell It on the Mountain was followed by such novels as Giovanni’s Room (1956,) Another Country (1962,) and Just Above My Head (1979)—all deliberate both homosexuality and the condition of African Americans.
Baldwin also wrote short stories, political and autobiographical essays, and plays. The Fire Next Time (1963) was a campaigning work for the American civil rights movement. None of his other later works achieved the popular and critical success of his early work. His influence on other American artists—such as singer Nina Simone, novelist Maya Angelou, novelist Toni Morrison—whether of spirit, love, or style, is undeniable.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by James Baldwin
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Patriotism
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Society
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Generations, Teams, Teamwork
The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Conformity, Defects
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Quotations
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.
—James Baldwin
Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Anger
James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.
—James Baldwin
Topics: History
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Sex
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Freedom
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Education
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Oppression
It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Giving, Charity
Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Humanity
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Career
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.
—James Baldwin
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Education
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Racism, Hate
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.
—James Baldwin
Topics: America
The future is like heaven—everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Future
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Power, Morals
Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Experience
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Miscellaneous, Action, Change, Win
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Books, Literature, Reading
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.
—James Baldwin
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
—James Baldwin
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Anger
He loved this street [42nd Street], not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Libraries
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Respect
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Society, Children, Listening, Example
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Perspective
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Society
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Creation
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Independence, Education
Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
—James Baldwin
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Innocence
Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Experience
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Love
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Change
People can cry much easier than they can change.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Change
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