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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
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After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.
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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 questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
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Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
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When the South has trouble with its Negroes - when the Negroes refuse to remain in their place - it blames outside agitators and Northern interference. When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
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For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
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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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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
James A. Baldwin
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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
James A. Baldwin
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It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
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.
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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.
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Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
James A. Baldwin
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Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
James A. Baldwin
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
James A. Baldwin