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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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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
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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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It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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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Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
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At four o'clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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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.
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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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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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Writing is a political instrument.
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It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.
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If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
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We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.
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Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
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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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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.
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Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
James A. Baldwin