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Quotes About Judgment

But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded.
~ James Baldwin
People make you pay for the way you look, which is also the way you think you look, and what time writes is a record of that collision.
~ James Baldwin
If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don't see what they see, this can be very painful.
~ James Baldwin
And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitability undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgement, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.
~ James Baldwin
They are just dirty, all of them, low and cheap and dirty.' He stretched out his hand and pulled me down to the floor beside him. 'All except you. Tous, sauf toi.' He held my face between his hands and I supposed such tenderness has scarcely ever produced such terror as I then felt. 'Ne me laisse pas tomber, je t'en prie,' he said, and kissed me, with a strange insistent gentleness on the mouth.
~ James Baldwin
I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.
~ James Baldwin
the righteous must be able to locate the damned.
~ James Baldwin
If you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty- they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing
~ James Baldwin
I think she's a beautiful woman. She may not be beautiful to look at whatever the fuck that means, in this kingdom of the blind.
~ James Baldwin
But she saw nothing in my eyes—she stared at me as though I had made a long journey on a white charger all the way to her prison house.
~ James Baldwin
People make you pay for the way you look, which is also the way you think you look, and what time writes in a human face is the record of that collision.
~ James Baldwin
The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not.
~ James Baldwin
In the eeriest way possible, I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman. I had almost said, after all, Well, take my friend Mary, and very nearly descended to a catalogue of those virtues that gave Mary the right to be alive. And in what hope? That Elijah and the others would nod their heads solemnly and say, at least, Well, she's all right - but the others!
~ James Baldwin
C'est leur innocence qui constitue leur crime
~ James Baldwin
it seemed that all the people who were sentenced that day had made, or clearly were going to make, crime their career. This seemed to be the opinion of the judge, who scarcely looked at the prisoners or listened to them; it seemed to be the opinion of the prisoners, who scarcely bothered to speak in their own behalf; it seemed to be the opinion of the lawyers, state lawyers for the most part, who were defending them.
~ James Baldwin
the look in his eyes was so bottomlessly bitter it was almost benevolent.
~ James Baldwin
Judgment," she said, "has nothing to do with love.
~ James Baldwin
what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.
~ James Baldwin
What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer too
~ James Baldwin
One had to make one's way carefully here, for all these people were blind.
~ James Baldwin
Again, the terms "civilized" and "Christian" begin to have a very strange ring, particularly in the ears of those who have been judged to be neither civilized nor Christian, when a Christian nation surrenders to a foul and violent orgy, as Germany did during the Third Reich.
~ James Baldwin
She is a beautiful woman. She may not be beautiful to look at, whatever the fuck that means in this kingdom of the blind.
~ James Baldwin
You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?
~ James Baldwin
A liar always knows he is lying, and that is why liars travel in packs: in order to be reassured that the judgment day will never come for them. They need each other for the well-being, the health, the perpetuation of their lie.
~ James Baldwin