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It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.

James A. Baldwin

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James A. Baldwin
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More quotes by James A. Baldwin

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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.
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You took the best, so why not take the rest?
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I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.
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You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.
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No man is a devil in his own mind.
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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
James A. Baldwin
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What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
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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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Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
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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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A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
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The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
James A. Baldwin
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I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
James A. Baldwin
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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.
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