James Baldwin quotes consists of the thoughts of a man who spoke out against hatred and how it affected the human race. He was one who talked about love and its effects on others, his remarks display some level of poetry at times. He was an ardent activist who worked with men like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
James Arthur Baldwin was an American activist, playwright, essayist, poet, and novelist. His affiliation with many other activists brought him more into the limelight. He mingled with popular names like Maya Angelou who was also an activist and poet. Below are a number of quotes from him.
Quote #1 “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.” |
Quote #2 “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” |
Quote #3 "It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” |
Quote #4 “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” |
Quote #5 “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.” |
Quote #6 “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” |
Quote #7 “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” |
Quote #8 “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” |
Quote #9 “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.” |
Quote #10 “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.” |
Quote #11 “I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.” |
Quote #12 “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.” |
Quote #13 “Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” |
Quote #14 “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.” |
Quote #15 “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” |
Quote #16 “People can cry much easier than they can change.” |
Quote #17 “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.” |
Quote #18 “It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.” |
Quote #19 “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” |
Quote #20 “People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.” |
Quote #21 “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” |
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Quote #23 “Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.” |
Quote #24 “People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.” |
Quote #25 “You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.” |
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Quote #27 “You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” |
Quote #28 “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” |
Quote #29 “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” |
Quote #30 “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.” |
Quote #31 “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.” |
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Quote #33 “To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” |
Quote #34 “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” |
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Quote #36 “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.” |
Quote #37 “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.” |
Quote #38 “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” |
Quote #39 “Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.” |
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Quote #41 “For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.” |
Quote #42 “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.” |
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Quote #44 "Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel." |
Quote #45 “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.” |
Quote #46 “Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” |
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James Baldwin’s quotes could be considered controversial at times because of what he said. He, however, talked about an issue that affects everyone in one form or another and that is hate. I hope something he said inspires us all to love in the way we should.