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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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Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.
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Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
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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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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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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
James A. Baldwin
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
James A. Baldwin
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Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.
James A. Baldwin
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
James A. Baldwin
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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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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
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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.
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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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin