James A. Baldwin Quotes

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person - ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.

If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world.

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.

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.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

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

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

It comes as a great shock…to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance…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.

For nothing is fixed, 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 moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

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 have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who 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 ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.

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.

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

The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

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.

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.

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.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution. Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go.

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

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

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

Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.

The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.

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

A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.

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.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

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

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.

I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason... Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are.

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

The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

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.

We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

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

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

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

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

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.