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A devotion to humanity is... too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
Atheism
Cause
Humanity
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Bloodthirsty
Equated
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Devotion
Easily

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An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.
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If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.
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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
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And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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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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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
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It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.
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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.
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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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It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
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You write in order to change the world.
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Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
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The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
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We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.
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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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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A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
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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.
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