James Baldwin Quotes

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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