Quote by James Baldwin

““It doesn't do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can't be reached.””

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“In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be…

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

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“All cultures have, furthermore, an economic, social, and political base, and no culture can continue to live if its political destiny is not in its own hands. “Any political and social regime which destroys the self-determination of a people also destroys the creative power of that people.” When this has happened the culture of that people has been destroyed. And…

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

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

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“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…

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

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

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“Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception.”

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

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“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

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“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 know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him—for that…

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