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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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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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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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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.
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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.
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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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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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Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.
James A. Baldwin
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It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
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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.
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
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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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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
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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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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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There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
James A. Baldwin
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If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
James A. Baldwin
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Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.
James A. Baldwin
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
James A. Baldwin
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A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
James A. Baldwin