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If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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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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I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him.
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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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Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
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Writing is a political instrument.
James A. Baldwin
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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Somebody, said Jacques, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
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Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
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Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin
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Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
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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.
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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