Words matter. These are the best James Baldwin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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 it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.
Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
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 the lives they lead.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities.
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 reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
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.
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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 growing up.
There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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 to deal with pain.
Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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.
