James Baldwin Quotes
200 James Baldwin Quotes
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Baldwin
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
James Baldwin
The future is like heaven – everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.
James Baldwin
You cannot fix what you will not face.
James Baldwin
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
A ghetto can be improved in only one way: out of existence.
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 utmost inhuman excesses.
James Baldwin
I know that what I am asking is impossible.
James Baldwin
It testified to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.
James Baldwin
I stated reading. I read everything I could get my hands on… By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
James Baldwin
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.
James Baldwin
No one ever told me that Alexandre Dumas was a mulatto.
James Baldwin
No one told me that Pushkin was black.
James Baldwin
As far as I knew, which is much more important, there’d never been anything called a black writer.
James Baldwin
What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rule of society.
James Baldwin
The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and change it and fight it – at no matter what risk.
James Baldwin
The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white.
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.
James Baldwin
Fathers and sons arrive at that relationship only by claiming that relationship: that is by paying for it.
James Baldwin
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.
James Baldwin
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
James Baldwin
I was not born to be what someone else said I was.
James Baldwin
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
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
Someone told me life is a water wheel. It turns. The trick is to hold your nose when you’re under and not get dizzy when you’re up.
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
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
James Baldwin
Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
James Baldwin
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
James Baldwin
It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.
James Baldwin
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
James Baldwin
Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
James Baldwin
Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
James Baldwin
Most people in action are not worth very much; and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
James Baldwin
We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth, and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.
James Baldwin
I have met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
James Baldwin
If you don’t understand yourself, you don’t understand anybody else.
James Baldwin
If you are going to be a writer, there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer, nothing I can say will help you.
James Baldwin
People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
James Baldwin
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
James Baldwin
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