James Baldwin Quotes

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.”

Quote #22

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”

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.”

Quote #26

“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”

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 #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.”

Quote #32

“Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.”

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.”

Quote #35

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

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.”

Quote #40

“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.”

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.”

Quote #43

“Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?"

Quote #44

"Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel."

"And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?”

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.”

Quote #47

“I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.”

Quote #48

“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”

Quote #49

“Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.”

Quote #50

“The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.”

Quote #51

“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.”

Quote #52

“Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.”

Quote #53

“The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.”

Quote #54

“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”

Quote #55

“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”

Quote #56

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

Quote #57

“Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.”

Quote #58

“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”

Quote #59

“Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it”

Quote #60

“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.”

Quote #61

“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.”

Quote #62

“Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”

Quote #63

“Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.”

Quote #64

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

Quote #65

“I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason... Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are.”

Quote #66

“Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.”

Quote #67

“History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.”

Quote #68

“It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.”

Quote #69

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

Quote #70

“You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.”

Quote #71

“Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine- but trust your experience. Know whence you came.”

Quote #72

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”

Quote #73

“There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”

Quote #74

“With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”

Quote #75

“It comes as a great shock…to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance…has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.”