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In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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Employment is my right my destiny.
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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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It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
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The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
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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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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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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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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.
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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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.
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I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.
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A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
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An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
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Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.
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Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
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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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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.
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We can make America what America must become.
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But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
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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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