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To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
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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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A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
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If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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Writing is a political instrument.
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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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To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
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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.
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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
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People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.
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The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.
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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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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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