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An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
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There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
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All racists are irresponsible.
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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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It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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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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The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
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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 write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.
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God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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When the South has trouble with its Negroes - when the Negroes refuse to remain in their place - it blames outside agitators and Northern interference. When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
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