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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
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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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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And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
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There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
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Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
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We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
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At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.
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You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.' 'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.
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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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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
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.
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People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
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