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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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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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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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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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You write in order to change the world.
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To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it fears must be faced.
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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.
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Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
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A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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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.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
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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.
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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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The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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