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James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 4

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Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

James A. Baldwin
African American, Wise Words, Humiliation
"Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

James A. Baldwin
Love You, Tricks, Persons

Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

James A. Baldwin
Thinking, Views, Revelations

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

James A. Baldwin
Education, Teacher, Children
"If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" by James A. Baldwin, archive.nytimes.com. July 29, 1979.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

James A. Baldwin
Education, Country, Independent

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

James A. Baldwin
Conformity, Should, Ideals

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

James A. Baldwin
Thinking, White, Racism

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

James A. Baldwin
Inspirational, Success, Broken Heart
"James Baldwin's much anticipated new novel - archive" by Hugh Hebert, www.theguardian.com. June 18, 2016.

Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.

James A. Baldwin
Art, Mean, People
Interview with Studs Terkel (1961), as quoted in "Conversations With James Baldwin" edited by Fred R. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, May 1, 1989.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

James A. Baldwin
Law, Justice, Humanity
"Fifth Avenue, Uptown" by James A. Baldwin, www.esquire.com. July 1960.

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.

James A. Baldwin
Love, Relationship, Romantic
"Nobody Knows My Name". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1961.

The impossible is the least that one can demand.

James A. Baldwin
Demand, Impossible
"Letter from a Region in My Mind". www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

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.

James A. Baldwin
Helping Others, Reality, People
"Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

James A. Baldwin
Sweet, Art, Real
"Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1955.

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

James A. Baldwin
Hate, Men, Law

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

James A. Baldwin
Blood, Way, Beats

People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the "niggers" is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.

James A. Baldwin
Order, White, People
"Fifth Avenue, Uptown" by James A. Baldwin, www.esquire.com. July 1960.

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

James A. Baldwin
Past, Long, Horrible

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

James A. Baldwin
Fear, Grace, Growth
"Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James A. Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.

James A. Baldwin
Moving, Home, People

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

James A. Baldwin
Writing, Goal, Want

The interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

James A. Baldwin
Dream, Real, People

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

James A. Baldwin
Men, White, Black
"Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.

James A. Baldwin
People, Music Is, Knows

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

James A. Baldwin
Inspirational, Able, Dies

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