James a. baldwin quotes

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

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

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

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

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.

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

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

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.

This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.

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

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

When Americans look out on the world, they see nothing but dark and menacing strangers who appear to have no sense of rhythm at all, nor any respect or affection for white people; and white Americans really do not know what to make of all this, except to increase the defense budget.

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.

If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

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.

You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.

Artists are here to disturb the peace.

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.

The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

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

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

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

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

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.

Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.

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.

You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.

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

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

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.

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.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.

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.

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

God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.

White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.

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

People can cry much easier than they can change.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

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

A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.

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

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

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.

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them -- to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That's very important. If you don't forgive yourself you'll never be able to forgive anybody else and you'll go on committing the same crimes forever.

If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.

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

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.

The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

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

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

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.

Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.

The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

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

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

People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.

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.

In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.

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.

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

Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

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

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be 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.

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

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

You cannot fix what you will not face.

The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.

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.

If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.

The impossible is the least that one can demand.

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.

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

Recognizing a problem doesn't always bring a solution, but until we recognize that problem, there can be no solution.

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.

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.

To be born in a free society and not to be born free is to be born into a lie. To be told by co-citizens and co-Christians that you have no value, no history, have never done anything that is worthy of human respect destroys you because in the beginning you believe it.

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.

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

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

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

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

... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

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

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity

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.

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.

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 can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

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

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.

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.

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

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

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

I can't be a pessimist, because I am alive.