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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.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Situation
Become
Able
Ceased
Articulate
Victim
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
James A. Baldwin
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But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.
James A. Baldwin
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Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.
James A. Baldwin
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
James A. Baldwin
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Great art can only be created out of love.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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
James A. Baldwin
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Employment is my right my destiny.
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.
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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Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
James A. Baldwin
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Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
James A. Baldwin
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
James A. Baldwin
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It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
James A. Baldwin
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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
James A. Baldwin
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
James A. Baldwin
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We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
James A. Baldwin