James Baldwin Quotes

James Baldwin Quotes. Below is a collection of famous James Baldwin quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by James Baldwin. Share these quotations with your friends and family.

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 edu...

By James Baldwin
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in to...

By James Baldwin
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

By James Baldwin
It is very nearly impossible ... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

By James Baldwin
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

By James Baldwin
Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this...

By James Baldwin
I imagine the reason that people hold on to hatred so stubbornly is because if the hate is removed, the pain will set in.

By James Baldwin
We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

By James Baldwin
The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

By James Baldwin
If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

By James Baldwin
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

By James Baldwin
The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden -- as an unpatriotic act -- that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.

By James Baldwin
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

By James Baldwin
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

By James Baldwin
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

By James Baldwin
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

By James Baldwin
Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

By James Baldwin
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

By James Baldwin
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.

By James Baldwin
The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

By James Baldwin
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

By James Baldwin
We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.

By James Baldwin
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

By James Baldwin
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.

By James Baldwin
An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger. Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

By James Baldwin
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.

By James Baldwin
James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.

By James Baldwin
The future is... black.

By James Baldwin
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

By James Baldwin
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.

By James Baldwin