Quotes from James Baldwin

I don't think the negro problem can be discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need.

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.

Education is indoctrination if you're white — subjugation if you're black.

The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

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.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

There exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual the fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear.

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.

My life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.

If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

Freedom is not something that can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.

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.

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.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.