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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
Simply
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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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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.
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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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The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
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I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.
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We can make America what America must become.
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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
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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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Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
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When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.
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But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
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In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.
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