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There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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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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I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.
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Not only was I not born to be a slave I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.
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Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
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In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.
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It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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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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But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament it was a matter of punishment and grief.
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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
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The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
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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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I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
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There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
James A. Baldwin