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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.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
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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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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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There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
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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.
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Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.
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The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
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He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
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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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An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
James A. Baldwin
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
James A. Baldwin
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You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
James A. Baldwin
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You don't need numbers you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!
James A. Baldwin
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And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
James A. Baldwin
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But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.
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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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Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
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