James A. Baldwin Quotes (70 Quotes)

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

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

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

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

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.