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The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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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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Writing is a political instrument.
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
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Great art can only be created out of love.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
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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 started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
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God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
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Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person.
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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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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People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.
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Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.
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It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
James A. Baldwin
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Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands we have no right to assume otherwise. If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
James A. Baldwin