You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
—James Baldwin
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Prophecy
Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Freedom
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Spirit, Ambition
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Listening, Society, Example, Children
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
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Self-Discovery
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
He may be a very nice man. But I haven’t got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he’s got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That’s the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Police, Control
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
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Poor, The Poor, Poverty
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Art
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Pessimism
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
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
—James Baldwin
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex; you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Money, Sex
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Creation
A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Truth
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Love
We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Men & Women
We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.
—James Baldwin
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.
—James Baldwin
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Belief, Beliefs
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Belief
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
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 making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Rain, America
An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger. Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Identity
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Samuel Butler
- William Temple English Theologian
- Paul Goodman American Novelist, Essayist
- Silas Weir Mitchell American Physician, Writer
- Henry Eyring American Chemist
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