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.
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.
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.
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.
James Baldwin
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
James Baldwin
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
James Baldwin
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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.
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.
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.
James Baldwin
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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.
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.
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.
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.
James Baldwin
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
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.
James Baldwin
People can cry much easier than they can change.
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.
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.
James Baldwin
Art has to be a kind of confession.
James Baldwin
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James Baldwin