Quote

When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.

James A. Baldwin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James A. Baldwin
Broth
Scales
Boils
Revolution
Abused
Rights
Feeds
Order
Rebellion
Human
Grand
Humans
Scale
Purity

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

Image
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
James A. Baldwin
Image
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.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
James A. Baldwin
Image
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
James A. Baldwin
Image
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
Image
Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Secrets hidden at the heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to the light, as, on some unlucky high noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candor are bound to defeat even the most determined and agile inspector for the light is always changing and proves that the eye cannot be trusted.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
James A. Baldwin
Image
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.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Europe has what we [Americans] do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
James A. Baldwin
Image
There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
James A. Baldwin
Image
One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
James A. Baldwin
Image
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James A. Baldwin
Image
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
James A. Baldwin
Image
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
Image
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
James A. Baldwin
Image
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