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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.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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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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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 hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
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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.
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If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
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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.
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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
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To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it fears must be faced.
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A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.
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Society is held together by our need we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
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It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
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It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.
James A. Baldwin
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James A. Baldwin
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It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.
James A. Baldwin
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Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
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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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Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
James A. Baldwin