American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
People can cry much easier than they can change.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
There is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
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.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
- James A. Baldwin Quote
