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.”

“The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.”

“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.”

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.”

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

“...all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me...”

“And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.”

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

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

“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.”

“People can cry much easier than they can change.”

“...when the black populations of the world have a future, so will the Western nations have a future-and not till then. But the terrible probability is that the Western populations, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen, and for which generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.”

“The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.”

“There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.”

“People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility. (p. 81)”

“A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.”