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Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Culture
Indivisible
Negro
Diversity
Price
Identity
Loss
Pay
Justice
Dehumanization

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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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.
James A. Baldwin
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
James A. Baldwin
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
James A. Baldwin
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I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.
James A. Baldwin
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A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.
James A. Baldwin
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After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.
James A. Baldwin
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The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
James A. Baldwin
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If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
James A. Baldwin
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Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.
James A. Baldwin
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The miracle is that some have stepped out of the rags of the Republic's definition to assume the great burden and glory of their humanity and their responsibility for one another. It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it leaving the jailkeeper in the rubble.
James A. Baldwin
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
James A. Baldwin
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
James A. Baldwin
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It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.
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.
James A. Baldwin
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
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.
James A. Baldwin
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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
James A. Baldwin
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
James A. Baldwin