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
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
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: Literature, Books, Reading
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
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
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: Beliefs, Belief
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
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Identity
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Creation
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Self-Discovery
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
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
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
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
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Education
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Change, Miscellaneous, Action, Win
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Society, Listening, Children, Example
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
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
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Respect
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: Artists, Arts, Art
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Career
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: Teams, Teamwork, Generations
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
Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck—but, most of all, endurance.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Talent
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
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.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Exile
The future is… black.
—James Baldwin
Topics: Future, The Future
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Samuel Butler British Author
- William Temple English Theologian
- Paul Goodman American Novelist, Essayist
- Silas Weir Mitchell American Physician, Writer
- Henry Eyring American Chemist
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