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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
Humanity
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.
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If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
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White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
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It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
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James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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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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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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It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.
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Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
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Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.
James A. Baldwin
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Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
James A. Baldwin
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.
James A. Baldwin
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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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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If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
James A. Baldwin