James Baldwin Quotes
200 James Baldwin Quotes
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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
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
Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
James Baldwin
The relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
James Baldwin
I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
James Baldwin
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
James Baldwin
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
James Baldwin
[On Ralph Ellison] Ellison is as angry as anybody can be and still live.
James Baldwin
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always know it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
James Baldwin
I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.
James Baldwin
You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you… long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
James Baldwin
Heroes can be found less in large things than in small ones, less in public than in private.
James Baldwin
My life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.
James Baldwin
The purpose of education is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
James Baldwin
There is a great space where sex ought to be; and what usually fills this space is violence.
James Baldwin
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
James Baldwin
The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.
James Baldwin
I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least one can demand – and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general and American Negro history in particular, for it testified to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.
James Baldwin
If we do not dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!
James Baldwin
I’ve been here 350 years but you’ve never seen me.
James Baldwin
The depthless alienation from oneself and one’s people is, in sum, the American experience.
James Baldwin
Americans want to believe a great many things about themselves which are not true.
James Baldwin
The burden that is placed on you because you’re a Negro male is terrifying.
James Baldwin
You can’t tell a black man by the color of his skin.
James Baldwin
The western world has created me, given me my name; has hidden my truth as a permanent and historical fact. I may recover from this and I may not. I’m a grim man, old and insane enough to tell you that not many survive being born black in America.
James Baldwin
I moved to Europe in 1948 because I was trying to become a writer and couldn’t find in my surroundings, in my own country, a certain stamina, a certain corroboration that I needed. For example, no one ever told me that Alexandre Dumas was a mulatto. No one told me that Pushkin was black. As far as I knew when I was very young there’d never been anything… As far as I knew, which is much more important, there’d never been anything called a black writer.
James Baldwin
Writers are extremely important in a country, whether or not the country knows it.
James Baldwin
Our suffering is our bridge to one another.
James Baldwin
White supremacy comes from Europe.
James Baldwin
Your crown has been bought and paid for. All you must do is put it on your head.
James Baldwin
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
James Baldwin
The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white…This incredibly limited, not to say dimwitted ambition has choked many a human being to death here: and this, I contend, is because the white American has never accepted the real reasons for his journey. I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require of my captivity a song. They require of me a song less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own.
James Baldwin
[In 1970] As long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness – for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps – they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of – and justify – as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children or their fate.
James Baldwin
They had been formed by the images made of them by those who had had the deepest necessity to despise them.
James Baldwin
[In 1955] The world is white no longer, and it will never be again.
James Baldwin
We live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal… for if they take you in the morning they will be coming for us that night.
James Baldwin
[In 1963] What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.
James Baldwin
Artists are here to disturb the peace.
James Baldwin
We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a women 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.
James Baldwin
There exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.
James Baldwin
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