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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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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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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.
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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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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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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.
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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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An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
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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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If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
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There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.
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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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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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You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
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Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.
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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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You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
James A. Baldwin