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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

James A. Baldwin

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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.
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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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A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
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A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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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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It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
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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.
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We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
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Writing is a political instrument.
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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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Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
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