James Baldwin

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

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

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.

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

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.

The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

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.

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

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

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.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

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.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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