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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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More quotes by James A. Baldwin
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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You write in order to change the world.
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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 world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
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It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.
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God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
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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 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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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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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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Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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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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Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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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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