“I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe,… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Of course, I must say that I don't think America is God's gift to anybody--if it is, God's days have got to… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived,… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live, and have lived here, are so ugly… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“All cultures have, furthermore, an economic, social, and political base, and no culture can continue to live if its political destiny is not in… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and days had… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty.But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“What kind of friendship have you had? Or for that matter...what kind of love affairs?” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception.” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.” — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“He was suggesting that all Negroes were held in a state of supreme tension between the difficult, dangerous relationship in which they stood to… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
