James A. Baldwin Quotes
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
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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.
[Against]
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
[Children]
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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 most inhuman excesses.
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Education is indoctrination, if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
[Education]
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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.
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Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
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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.
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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
[Experience]
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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.
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Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
[Freedom]
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
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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.
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