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It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Individual
Speak
Country
Many
People
Astonishing
Devoted
Afraid

More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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When the South has trouble with its Negroes - when the Negroes refuse to remain in their place - it blames outside agitators and Northern interference. When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
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A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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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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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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
James A. Baldwin
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The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
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Writing is a political instrument.
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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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There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
James A. Baldwin
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I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
James A. Baldwin
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It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
James A. Baldwin
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What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
James A. Baldwin
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
James A. Baldwin
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We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
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