All James A. Baldwin Quotes
- This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again. Ethics
- James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in… Awaken
- If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it. Ahead
- I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen? Beginning
- One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. Beacon
- Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in… All
- People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes… Anymore
- It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves… Assume
- All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the… All
- True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life All
- Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go. Absolutely
- Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Action
- We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to… Achieve
- Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being. Another Naked
- For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be… All
- There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous… Contemptuous
- Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be Anybody
- I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I… Act
- History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about. Anonymous
- The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't… All
- To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An… Accept
- In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of… Ambiguity
- The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to… Acheive
- People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight… Beings
- Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to… Absolutely