James Baldwin Quotes (69 Quotes)

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....

Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given, freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

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.

Society is held together by our need we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

Not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--and in the oddest places--for the lack of it.

Life is more important than art that's what makes art important.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

Beyond talent lie all the usual words discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.

A child cannot be taught by someone who despises him.

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.

Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need a sense of life's possibilities.

Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as the very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a mighty intimidating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid the state of being alone.

Man cannot live by profit alone.

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.

Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.

It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.

The Negro past of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape death and humiliation fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect rage, hatred and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.

There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one --you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at the mercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.

Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.

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.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.

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

The future is . . . black.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than the natural state

Hatred destroys the person who hates.

If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.

Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.

The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.

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.

One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.

Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.