James Baldwin

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?"”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“People can cry much easier than they can change.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”

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

“If one wishes to be instructed-not that anyone does-concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one's head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”

“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 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.”

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

“”

“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.”

“Men--not just babies like you, but old men, too--they always need a woman to tell them the truth.”

“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.”

“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. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”

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

“I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“People can cry much easier than they can change.”

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

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

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

“The Americans are funny. You have a funny sense of time--or perhaps you have no sense of time at all, I can't tell. Time always sounds like a parade”

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

“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. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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