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The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
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Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.
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Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
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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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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
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Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
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There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity
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All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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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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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
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The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
James A. Baldwin
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We can make America what America must become.
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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
James A. Baldwin
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To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
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