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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.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
James A. Baldwin
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Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
James A. Baldwin
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What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
James A. Baldwin
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I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
James A. Baldwin
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
James A. Baldwin
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All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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Employment is my right my destiny.
James A. Baldwin
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This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.
James A. Baldwin
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
James A. Baldwin
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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
James A. Baldwin
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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
James A. Baldwin