Quotes from James A. Baldwin

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

Man cannot live by profit alone.

I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.

A man's balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.

An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.

Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.

Artists are here to disturb the peace.

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.

God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.

To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

There was no room in God's army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God's will. Let the church cry amen to this!

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

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.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

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

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

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.