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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.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Sense
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
James A. Baldwin
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
James A. Baldwin
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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
James A. Baldwin
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We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
James A. Baldwin
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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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Great art can only be created out of love.
James A. Baldwin
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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
James A. Baldwin
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People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
James A. Baldwin
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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
James A. Baldwin
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I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.
James A. Baldwin
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Writing is a political instrument.
James A. Baldwin
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And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
James A. Baldwin
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I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.
James A. Baldwin
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He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
James A. Baldwin
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There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.
James A. Baldwin