“They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“I was also able to see that the principles governing the rites and customs of the churches in which I grew up… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In Africa, he said, there was none whatever. Africans do not, in fact, believe that Christianity is any longer real for Europeans,… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“I realized that the Bible had been written by white men. I knew that, according to many Christians, I was a descendant… — James Baldwin Copy Share Image
“In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty—necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who… — 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
