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

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Nothing
Creation
Men
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
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Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
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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.
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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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Europe has what we [Americans] 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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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.
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I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years
James A. Baldwin
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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.
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It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
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People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
James A. Baldwin