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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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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
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For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
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I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
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What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
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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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Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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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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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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I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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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It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
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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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When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
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