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We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.
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Society is held together by our need we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
James A. Baldwin
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The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
James A. Baldwin
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
James A. Baldwin
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The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. - James Baldwin, The Creative Process
James A. Baldwin
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Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
James A. Baldwin
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
James A. Baldwin
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I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
James A. Baldwin
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
James A. Baldwin
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People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.
James A. Baldwin
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The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
James A. Baldwin
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
James A. Baldwin
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
James A. Baldwin
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It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.
James A. Baldwin
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The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
James A. Baldwin
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Secrets hidden at the heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to the light, as, on some unlucky high noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candor are bound to defeat even the most determined and agile inspector for the light is always changing and proves that the eye cannot be trusted.
James A. Baldwin