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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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A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
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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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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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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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You don't need numbers you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
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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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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.
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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 seem untimely.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.
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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
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For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
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We can make America what America must become.
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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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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
James A. Baldwin
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Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
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.
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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.
James A. Baldwin