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People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Long
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Invite
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
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Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
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All racists are irresponsible.
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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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She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.
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Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
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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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All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.
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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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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it fears must be faced.
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