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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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James A. Baldwin
Power
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Men
Whenever
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White
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Threatened

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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
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The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
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You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
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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.
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It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.
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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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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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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.
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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.
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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
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It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
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When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
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When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
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It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.
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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.
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... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
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Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.
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