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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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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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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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The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
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Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
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There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.
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A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
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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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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.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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We can make America what America must become.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
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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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Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
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A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
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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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Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.
James A. Baldwin