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But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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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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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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It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
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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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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
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I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
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Somebody, said Jacques, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
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... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
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We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.
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It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
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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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We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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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When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.
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Employment is my right my destiny.
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