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.”

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”

“When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.”

“No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.”

“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.”

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”

“I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.”

“To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

“The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.”

“The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”

“Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.”

“Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.”

“The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”

“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.”

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.”

“An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.”