Quote: Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours. [James Baldwin]
Quote: 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. [James Baldwin]
Quote: Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. [James Baldwin]
Quote: Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. [James Baldwin]
Quote: It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. [James Baldwin]
Quote: A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. [James Baldwin]
Quote: The future is... black. [James Baldwin]
Quote: The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible. [James Baldwin]
Quote: Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair. [James Baldwin]
Quote: Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it. [James Baldwin]
Quote: If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons. [James Baldwin]
Quote: We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it. [James Baldwin]
Quote: There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention. [James Baldwin]
Quote: It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. [James Baldwin]
Quote: Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations. [James Baldwin]
Quote: An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience. [James Baldwin]
Quote: People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. [James Baldwin]
Quote: Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. [James Baldwin]
Quote: But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power. [James Baldwin]
Quote: The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land. [James Baldwin]
Quote: Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. [James Baldwin]
Quote: The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love. [James Baldwin]
Quote: We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real. [James Baldwin]
Quote: 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 Baldwin]
Quote: It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless. [James Baldwin]