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James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 8

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True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life

James A. Baldwin
Mistake, Passion, Rebel

It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.

James A. Baldwin
Lying, Cameras, Want

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

James A. Baldwin
Justice, Diversity, Culture

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.

James A. Baldwin
Morning, Pain, Terrible Events

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.

James A. Baldwin
Art, Kindness, Survival
"Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1961.

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.

James A. Baldwin
Racism, Age, World

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

James A. Baldwin
Love, Romantic, Thinking

I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.

James A. Baldwin
Eye, Men, Humanity

All racists are irresponsible.

James A. Baldwin
Race, Racism, Racist

It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.

James A. Baldwin
Gratitude, People, Justice

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

James A. Baldwin
Eye, Men, Attention

It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you James and Godspeed.

James A. Baldwin
Country, Men, Odds
"A Letter to My Nephew" by James Baldwin, progressive.org. January 1, 1962.

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.

James A. Baldwin
Spiritual, Done, May

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

James A. Baldwin
Respect, Thinking, Effort
"Eighty-Five from the Archive: James Baldwin" by Erin Overbey, www.newyorker.com. February 11, 2010.

Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that 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.

James A. Baldwin
Father, Should Have, People

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.

James A. Baldwin
Hurt, Book, Reading

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

James A. Baldwin
Black And White, People, Forever

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

James A. Baldwin
Journey, Perspective, Looks

It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.

James A. Baldwin
Numbers, One Day, Twenties

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

James A. Baldwin
Reality, Artistic, Force

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.

James A. Baldwin
Art, Creativity, Being Alone
"The Creative Process" by James A. Baldwin originally published in The National Culture Center's "Creative America", 1962, and later published in James A. Baldwin "The Price of the Ticket", 1985.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

James A. Baldwin
Running, Smart, Teaching

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.

James A. Baldwin
Society, Together, Foundation

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

James A. Baldwin
Country, Hands, Racism
"Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

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

James A. Baldwin
Justice, Experience, Innocence

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