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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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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But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.
James A. Baldwin
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Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
James A. Baldwin
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There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
James A. Baldwin
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
James A. Baldwin
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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity
James A. Baldwin
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America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.
James A. Baldwin
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It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
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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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
James A. Baldwin
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.
James A. Baldwin
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
James A. Baldwin
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The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.
James A. Baldwin
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The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
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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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 trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
James A. Baldwin
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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
James A. Baldwin