Quotes About Humanity

We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement. We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God's name. This, then, is the best that God (the white God) can do. If that is so, then it is time to replace Him—replace Him with what? And this void, this despair, this torment is felt everywhere in the West, from the streets of Stockholm to the churches of New Orleans and the sidewalks of Harlem.

One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us

It is only 'the so-called American Negro' who remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognise him as a human being.

We think that once one has discovered that thirty thousand, let us say, Negroes, Chinese or Puerto Ricans or whatever have syphilis or don't, or are unemployed or not, that we've discovered something about the Negroes, Chinese or Puerto Ricans. But in fact, this is not so. In fact, we've discovered nothing very useful because people cannot be handled in that way.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one...

We're all bastards. That's why we need our friends.

If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so bad.

who watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands.

nobody stays in the garden of Eden.

All doormen, for example, and all policemen have by now, for me, become exactly the same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms.

The white man needs the nigger because he cannot tolerate the nigger in himself.

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

To be androgynous, Webster's informs us, is to have both male and female characteristics. This means that there is a man in every woman, and a woman in every man. Sometimes this is recognised only when the chips are, brutally, down - when there is no longer any way to avoid this recognition. But love between a man and a woman, or love between any two human beings, would not be possible did we not have available to us the spiritual resources of both sexes.

Our humanity is our burden, our life. We need not battle for it. We need only to do what is infinitely more difficult: that is, accept it.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connect me with all the people that were alive, or who had ever been alive.

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

I am proud of these people not because of their colour but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty.

The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing … that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him

Books taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive. – James Baldwin, born on this day in 1924

Sin is the only heritage of the natural man...

All men, clearly, are primitive, but it can be doubted that that all men are primitive in the same way

Perhaps he is a fool or a coward, but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.

I doubt that Americans will ever be able to face the fact that the word 'homosexual' is not a noun. The root of this word, as Americans use it — or, as this word uses Americans — simply involves a terror of any human touch, since any human touch can change you.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read." ? James Baldwin, interview, 1963.