James Baldwin Quotes

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

To be a negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all the time.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated.

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.

Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.

It is not a romantic matter. It is the unutterable truth: all men are brothers. That’s the bottom line.

James Baldwin Quotes part 2

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never forgotten to imitate them.

The future is like heaven – everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world.

We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

People don’t have integrity. They have conditions for having integrity.

You think your pain and your heartache are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

America is not only a fantasy in people’s minds. America is a geopolitical reality.

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that.

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.

I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.

It is not a romantic matter. It is the unutterable truth: all people are children when they sleep.

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

Everyone’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.

The poet is naked and lost in the play of the imagination.

Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupting somebody doing it.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

The moment we realize that the only time we have is now, the idea that causes so much trouble, ‘What are you going to do with it?’ disappears.

The most painful thing a parent can do is to smother a child.

I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.

A child has no patience with boundaries. They don’t see any.

One writes out of one thing only — one’s own experience.

The artist has one function—to affirm and explore life.

We carry the lives we’ve imagined with us all along the way to live or abandon.