James Baldwin Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

People can cry much easier than they can change.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.