Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration. . .
More Quotes from James Baldwin:
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.James Baldwin
The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
James Baldwin
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.
James Baldwin
If the word integration means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
James Baldwin
The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way ... people look at reality, then you can change it.
James Baldwin
We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.
James Baldwin
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Based on Keywords: confection, decoration, innocuous, piquantFirst of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experience to take slum life in that period and make something out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of responsibility to my family.
Frank McCourt
Another thing that I don't like to do is show too much how it goes. I do it once in a blue moon. Sometimes there are lessons when I don't pick up a violin at all.
Itzhak Perlman
Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
George Bernard Shaw