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Best One Quotes by James A. Baldwin
- Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the…
- The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
- The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
- One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
- One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
- The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself…
- The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers…
- To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.
- There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and…
- A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control…
- What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.
- A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.
- 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…
- One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
- 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…
- 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
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- The impossible is the least that one can demand.
- To hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first . . . acceptance totally without rancor, of life…
- Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
- The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
- Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the…
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More One Quotes
- In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism. — Hannah Arendt
- Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but… — Hannah Arendt
- Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake… — Hannah Arendt
- Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either… — Hannah Arendt
- To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough… — Hannah Arendt
- No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has… — Hannah Arendt
- The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the… — Hannah Arendt
- Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and… — Hannah Arendt
- I find that it's hard to fully examine one's life and not have faith be part of the discussion. — J. J. Abrams
- The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes. — Aristotle
- All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire. — Aristotle
- Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes… — Aristotle