58 result(s) for James Baldwin Quotes.
"The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see."
"American society is an anxious, repressed, and conformist society, even though it tends to praise itself for its supposed openness and rugged individualism."
"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be."
"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
"The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change the world."
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers."
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"If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see."
"The root function of language is to control the universe by describing it."
"It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here."
"The crowning experience of all is to be born in fear and to overcome it."
"It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."
"The impossible is the least that one can demand."
"The most dangerous man is the one who has nothing to lose."
"A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled."
"Anyone who has not faced the dark places within them and done the work of controlling them is dangerous."
"Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."
"If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all."
"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."
"The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."
"Love is a growing up."
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"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread."
"The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes."
"Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition."
"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."
"History does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do."
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."
"One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light."
"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction."
"Some people are white because they were born white and subconsciously, at least in some cases, they refused to be black."
"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
"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."
"The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it."
"The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated."
"The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."
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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."
"Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go."
"Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock."
"To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger."
"God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water the fire next time!"
"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."
"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."
"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose."
"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."
"You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."
"The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
"Maybe home is nothing but two arms holding you tight when you're at your worst."
"The precise role of the artist is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place."
"People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents."
"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."
"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers."
"I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."
"To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it."
"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."
"The world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank."
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
"I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do."
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