Quotes About Influence

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

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.

Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.

Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.

It is your responsibility to change the society if you think yourself as an educated person

White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer, merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, 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.

What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice to your own murderers, because you believe the same things they do.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. Civil Rights activist, author, and critic James Baldwin was born on#ThisDayinHistory 1924

If men don't know what's happening, what they're doing, where they're going--what are women to do? If Richard doesn't know what kind of world he wants, how am I to help him make it? What am I to tell our sons?

And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played—and play—in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know. The

You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.

Ah! she said, men may be at the mercy of women?I think men like that idea, it strokes the misogynist in them. But if a particular man is ever at the mercy of a particular woman ?why, he's somehow stopped being a man.

How can one... dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power?

The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.

I had a girl friend, named Geneva, a kind of loud, raunchy girl ... and she was always into something. Naturally she was my best friend, since I was never into anything. I was skinny and scared and so I followed her and got into all her shit. Nobody else wanted me, really, and you know that nobody else wanted her.

The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.

I had discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held the power and what they were like when you held the power.

They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power.

And yet power is real, and many things, including, very often, love, cannot be achieved without it.

I don't know, I'm just my mother's son. Sometimes that's all that makes the difference between us and them.

How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power?

men may be at the mercy of women - I think men like that idea, it strokes the misogynist in them.