James Baldwin quotes

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. (James Baldwin)
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. View quote
James Baldwin
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. View quote
James Baldwin
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did. View quote
James Baldwin
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. View quote
James Baldwin
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. View quote
James Baldwin
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. View quote
James Baldwin
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side. View quote
James Baldwin
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. View quote
James Baldwin
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. View quote
James Baldwin
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. (James Baldwin)
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. View quote
James Baldwin
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose. View quote
James Baldwin
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. View quote
James Baldwin
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. View quote
James Baldwin
Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. View quote
James Baldwin
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. View quote
James Baldwin
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now. View quote
James Baldwin
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. View quote
James Baldwin
People can cry much easier than they can change. View quote
James Baldwin
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock. (James Baldwin)
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions. View quote
James Baldwin
Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty - necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. View quote
James Baldwin
Art has to be a kind of confession. View quote
James Baldwin
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. View quote
James Baldwin