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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
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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.
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The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.
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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.
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White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
James A. Baldwin
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Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.
James A. Baldwin
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It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.
James A. Baldwin
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.
James A. Baldwin
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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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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
James A. Baldwin
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James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.
James A. Baldwin
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Great art can only be created out of love.
James A. Baldwin
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
James A. Baldwin
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It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
James A. Baldwin
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All racists are irresponsible.
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At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
James A. Baldwin