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James A. Baldwin Quotes - Page 9

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But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.

But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.

James A. Baldwin
Someone You Love, Horror, Chips

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

James A. Baldwin
Inability, Emotion, Dishonesty
"Everybody’s Protest Novel". Essay by James A. Baldwin (1949), as quoted in "Uneasy Rider" by Alexandra Schwartz, www.newyorker.com. November 9, 2015.

For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

James A. Baldwin
Unbearable

Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.

James A. Baldwin
Maturity, Love Is, Lightning

Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

James A. Baldwin
White, Forever, Black
"The Price of the Ticket". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1985.

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.

James A. Baldwin
New York, Mistake, Cities

Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.

James A. Baldwin
Christian, Culture, Raised

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

James A. Baldwin
Real, Men, White Man

There are, forever, swamps to be drained, cities to be created, mines to be exploited, children to be fed ... But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through vast forests, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

James A. Baldwin
Children, Men, Artist

No man is a devil in his own mind.

James A. Baldwin
Men, Mind, Devil

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

James A. Baldwin
Long, Doe, World

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

James A. Baldwin
Life, Thinking, Trying

No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.

James A. Baldwin
Ignorance, Fire, Imagination

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

James A. Baldwin
Passion, Challenges, Friendly

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, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

James A. Baldwin
America, Society, Battle
"Notes of a Native Son". Book by James Baldwin, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 21, 1955.

We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

James A. Baldwin
People, Independence, Mind

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

James A. Baldwin
Echoes, Profound, Desire

In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.

James A. Baldwin
Men, Thinking, Vision

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

James A. Baldwin
Real, War, Artist

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

James A. Baldwin
Art, Answers, Purpose

The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.

James A. Baldwin
Betrayal, Believe, Would Be
"Stranger in the Village". Harper's Magazine; republished in "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), October 1953.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

James A. Baldwin
White, People, Knows
"The Fire Next Time". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1963.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore

James A. Baldwin
Luxury, Confusion, Young

Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.

James A. Baldwin
Experience, Affair, Speechless

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

James A. Baldwin
Wisdom, People, History
"Justice at last?" by Gary Younge, www.theguardian.com. June 5, 2005.

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