Quotes from James Baldwin

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

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.

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

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 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.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

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.

People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

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.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

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

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