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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.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
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The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
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A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
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I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.
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I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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You don't need numbers you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
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Employment is my right my destiny.
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Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.
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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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The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
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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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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
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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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I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.
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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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