James A. Baldwin Quotes

335 quotes in 3702 categories

• 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…
• Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
• Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
• The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
• Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
• It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
• 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.
• Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
• 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…
• I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
• 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.
• It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
• 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…
• 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.
• The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

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