Quotes About James Baldwin

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

Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

There will be, and should be, reams and reams of analysis, even praise, for our friend but also even larger measures of non-analysis and, certainly, condemnation for James Baldwin, the Negro writer.

I went to the library and began to read some stuff on my own. My discovery of James Baldwin was life-changing. I read Go Tell It on the Mountain first, and that was hugely impactful.

town across the river. LOVE TAKES OFF MASKS THAT WE FEAR WE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT AND KNOW WE CANNOT LIVE WITHIN.—JAMES BALDWIN

LOVE TAKES OFF MASKS THAT WE FEAR WE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT AND KNOW WE CANNOT LIVE WITHIN.—JAMES BALDWIN

I do a lot of rewriting. It's very painful.

And the applause functions, then, in part, to pacify, narcotize, the resulting violent and inescapable discomfort.

[James] Baldwin "was one of greatest intellectuals of his time. He was an important voice, period, not an important black voice."

As much as I love to slay a red carpet hitting the ground running with 'Beale Street' and 'Native Son,' representing two such important voices in James Baldwin and Richard Wright let people know that I'm an artist and I really have something to say with this gift.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

When I first saw [James Baldwin] on television in the early sixties, I felt immediately a kinship with this man whose anger and disappointment with America's contradictions transformed his face into a warrior's face, whose tongue transformed our massacres into triumphs. And he left behind a hundred TV deaths: scholars, writers, teachers, and journalists shipwrecked by his revivals and sermons. And the Black audiences watched and shouted amen and felt clean and conscious and chosen.

James Baldwin is probably, for me and for many other people, one of the most extraordinary authors in this country, black or white. And he is somebody who changed my life.

I think that James Baldwin is, for sure, one of the most important American writer/thinkers of his time... not just African-American. He singled-handedly revolutionized the political, artistic, and historical discourses about America.

One of my favorite things on YouTube is the famous 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley at Cambridge University.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty...the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mark of cruelty.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

Of course, I must say that I don't think America is God's gift to anybody--if it is, God's days have got to be numbered. That God these people say they serve--and do serve, in ways that they don't know--has got a very nasty sense of humor. Like you'd beat the shit out of Him, if He was a man. Or: if you were.

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

All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.

We spend vast amounts of our time an emotional energy in learning how not to be natural and in eluding the trap of our own nature and it therefore becomes very difficult to know exactly what is meant when we speak of the unnatural. It is not possible to have it both ways, to use nature at one time as the final arbiter of human conduct and at another to oppose her as angrily as we do.