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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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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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You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
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The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
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But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.
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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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You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
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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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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.
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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.
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This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.
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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
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She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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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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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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.
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