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You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
James A. Baldwin
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America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one’s own sleep.
James A. Baldwin
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
James A. Baldwin
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I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
James A. Baldwin
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Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.
James A. Baldwin
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
James A. Baldwin
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
James A. Baldwin
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The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.
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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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
James A. Baldwin
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The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.
James A. Baldwin
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The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge. - James Baldwin, The Creative Process
James A. Baldwin
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All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin
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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity
James A. Baldwin
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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
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Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.
James A. Baldwin