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The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
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The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it fears must be faced.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.
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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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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.
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A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
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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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Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
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The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
James A. Baldwin