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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

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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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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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.
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Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
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The miracle is that some have stepped out of the rags of the Republic's definition to assume the great burden and glory of their humanity and their responsibility for one another. It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it leaving the jailkeeper in the rubble.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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You don't need numbers you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
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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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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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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.
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Somebody, said Jacques, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
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Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.
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To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
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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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A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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Writing is a political instrument.
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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