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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

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James A. Baldwin
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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
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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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We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.
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The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
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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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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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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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There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.
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When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
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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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The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.
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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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We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
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I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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