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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
People
Unnerving
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.
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Tell me, he said, What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for? Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel. And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?
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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
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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.
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
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Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.
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There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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We can make America what America must become.
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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
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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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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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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.
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If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
James A. Baldwin
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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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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
James A. Baldwin
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Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
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In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.
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You write in order to change the world.
James A. Baldwin