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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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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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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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Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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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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Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
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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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It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
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Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.
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I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
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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.
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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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There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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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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A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
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The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.
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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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