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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Hatred
Silent
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Contempt

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. - James Baldwin, The Creative Process
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God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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Employment is my right my destiny.
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Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
James A. Baldwin
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
James A. Baldwin
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Secrets hidden at the heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to the light, as, on some unlucky high noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candor are bound to defeat even the most determined and agile inspector for the light is always changing and proves that the eye cannot be trusted.
James A. Baldwin
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The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
James A. Baldwin
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
James A. Baldwin
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You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
James A. Baldwin
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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
James A. Baldwin
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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
James A. Baldwin
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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James A. Baldwin