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I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
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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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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
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God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
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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.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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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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It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.
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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.
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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.
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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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.
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