James A. Baldwin Quotations

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

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

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.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

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.

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.

The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

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.

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

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.

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

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

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

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

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

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

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.

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

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

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.

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.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

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.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

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.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

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.

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.

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.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

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.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

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.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

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.

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

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.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

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.

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.

There is a ''sanctity'' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

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

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

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

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

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.

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.

Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.

Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.

Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.

To defend one's self against fear is simply to ensure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

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

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

The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break forth from one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out

Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in

Not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--and in the oddest places!--for the lack of it.

If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

No man is a devil in his own mind.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

To hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first . . . acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are [;] . . . the second . . . that one must never, in one's life, accept . . . injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.

Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.