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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.
James A. Baldwin
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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin
I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
James A. Baldwin
We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
James A. Baldwin
If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.
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The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
James A. Baldwin
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
It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
James A. Baldwin
A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
James A. Baldwin
People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
James A. Baldwin
Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
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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White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
James A. Baldwin
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.
James A. Baldwin
No man is a devil in his own mind.
James A. Baldwin
A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.
James A. Baldwin
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James A. Baldwin
When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
James A. Baldwin
If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
James A. Baldwin
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
James A. Baldwin
