James Baldwin

“In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that…

— James Baldwin

“The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live, and have lived here, are…

— James Baldwin

“All cultures have, furthermore, an economic, social, and political base, and no culture can continue to live if its political destiny is…

— James Baldwin

“I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and…

— James Baldwin

“No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty.But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt”

— James Baldwin

“Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried…

— James Baldwin

“What kind of friendship have you had? Or for that matter...what kind of love affairs?”

— James Baldwin

“For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.”

— James Baldwin

“Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is…

— James Baldwin

“In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.”

— James Baldwin

“He was suggesting that all Negroes were held in a state of supreme tension between the difficult, dangerous relationship in which they…

— James Baldwin

“In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he…

— James Baldwin

“If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so…

— James Baldwin

“I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for…

— James Baldwin

“The paradox—and a fearful paradox it is—is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as…

— James Baldwin

“But it’s not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can’t…

— James Baldwin

“Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by…

— James Baldwin

“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”

— James Baldwin

“In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to…

— James Baldwin

“Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion…

— James Baldwin

“there was about his elders an ease in the holy place, and a levity, that made his soul uneasy.”

— James Baldwin

“The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America.…

— James Baldwin

“The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interpose…

— James Baldwin

“It ain't only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under.”

— James Baldwin

“this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history…

— James Baldwin