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A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Not only was I not born to be a slave I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.
James A. Baldwin
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There was no room in God's army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God's will. Let the church cry amen to this!
James A. Baldwin
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What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
James A. Baldwin
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
James A. Baldwin
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After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.
James A. Baldwin
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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
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
James A. Baldwin
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The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
James A. Baldwin
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If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
James A. Baldwin
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Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
James A. Baldwin
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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
James A. Baldwin
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
James A. Baldwin
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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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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
James A. Baldwin
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I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years
James A. Baldwin
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If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
James A. Baldwin
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Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
James A. Baldwin
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After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.
James A. Baldwin