James Baldwin Quotes | James Arthur Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924. He was an American writer and activist. As a writer, he garnered acclaim across various mediums, including essays, novels, plays, and poems.
His first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain, was published in 1953; decades later, Time Magazine included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels released from 1923 to 2005. His first essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, was published in 1955.
On December 1, 1987, Baldwin died from stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. He was buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.
Let’s read and share Quotes On Education, Equality, Love by James Baldwin
James Baldwin Quotes
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
– 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.”
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
– James Baldwin
“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.”
– 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
“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”
– James Baldwin
“An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.”
– James Baldwin
“It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
– James Baldwin
“Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.”
– James Baldwin
“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”
– James Baldwin
“Money, it turned out, was exactly like s*x, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.”
– James Baldwin
“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, or who had ever been alive.”
– James Baldwin
Inspirational James Baldwin Quotes
“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
“I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”
– James Baldwin
“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”
– James Baldwin
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
– 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
“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”
– 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
“I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.”
– James Baldwin
“The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.”
– James Baldwin
“To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”
– 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
“Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?”
– James Baldwin
“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.”
– James Baldwin
Justice James Baldwin Quotes
“The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.”
– James Baldwin
“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 Baldwin
“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.”
– James Baldwin
“Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.”
– James Baldwin
“It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.”
– James Baldwin
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
– James Baldwin
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
– James Baldwin
“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
– James Baldwin
“Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.”
– James Baldwin
“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
– James Baldwin
“The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.”
– James Baldwin
“The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”
– James Baldwin
James Baldwin Quotes On Education
“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.”
– James Baldwin
“A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.”
– James Baldwin
“When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.”
– James Baldwin
“When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn’t a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.”
– James Baldwin
“It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.”
– James Baldwin
“No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.”
– James Baldwin
“Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.”
– 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
“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”
– James Baldwin
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
– James Baldwin
James Baldwin Quotes Freedom
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. 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.”
– 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
“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
– James Baldwin
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
– James Baldwin
“Don’t miss these other books by Black authors that will stay with you long after you read them.”
– 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
“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.”
– James Baldwin
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
– James Baldwin
“The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”
– James Baldwin
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
– James Baldwin
“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.”
– James Baldwin
Famous James Baldwin Education Quotes
“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
“Be careful what you set your heart upon—for it will surely be yours.”
– James Baldwin
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
– James Baldwin
“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
– James Baldwin
“People can cry much easier than they can change.”
– James Baldwin
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
– James Baldwin
“Books taught me that things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me to everyone who is alive and who had ever been alive.”
– James Baldwin
“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.”
– James Baldwin
“The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.”
– James Baldwin
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
– James Baldwin
“And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.”
– James Baldwin
“If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real, they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.”
– James Baldwin
“The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
– James Baldwin
James Baldwin Quotes On Community
“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.”
– James Baldwin
“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.”
– James Baldwin
“Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
– James Baldwin
“I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.”
– James Baldwin
“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
– James Baldwin
“Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.”
– James Baldwin
“For he was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.”
– James Baldwin
“What a great difference there is,’ she said, ‘between dreaming of something and dealing with it!”
– James Baldwin
“To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”
– James Baldwin
“One must say yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found—and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is.”
– James Baldwin
“I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”
– James Baldwin
James Baldwin Quotes Freedom
“To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.”
– James Baldwin
“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be”
– 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
“The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”
– 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
“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.”
– James Baldwin
“Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.”
– James Baldwin
“People can cry much easier than they can change.”
– James Baldwin
“But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.”
– James Baldwin
“No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.”
– James Baldwin
“If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.”
– James Baldwin
Famous Justice James Baldwin Quotes
“The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.”
– James Baldwin
“It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.”
– James Baldwin
“The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.”
– James Baldwin
“If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.”
– James Baldwin
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