James Baldwin

(16 votes)   Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

James A. Baldwin
American, Author Quotes

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(13 votes)   People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

James A. Baldwin
American, Author Quotes

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(9 votes)   I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

James A. Baldwin
American, Author Quotes

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(8 votes)   Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

James A. Baldwin
American, Author Quotes

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(6 votes)   Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

James A. Baldwin
American, Author Quotes

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(6 votes)   Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

James A. Baldwin
American, Author Quotes

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(334 votes)   We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

James Baldwin
1924-1987, American Author

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(305 votes)   People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

James Baldwin
1924-1987, American Author

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(269 votes)   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.

James Baldwin
1924-1987, American Author

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(218 votes)   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

James Baldwin

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(217 votes)   Words like ''freedom,'' ''justice,'' ''democracy'' are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

James Baldwin
1924-1987, American Author

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(203 votes)   People can cry much easier than they can change.

James Baldwin
1924-1987, American Author

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(153 votes)   The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.

James Baldwin
1924-1987, American Author

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(139 votes)   Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.

James Baldwin
1924-1987, American Author

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(136 votes)   There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

James Baldwin
1924-1987, American Author

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