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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Doe
Men
Victimize
Persecution
Helpless
Rare
Prejudice

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The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
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Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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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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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
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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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The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
James A. Baldwin
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The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
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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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A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.
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Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
James A. Baldwin
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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James A. Baldwin
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Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James A. Baldwin
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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