James A. Baldwin
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.Collection: Inspirational
You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.Collection: Ideas
I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.Collection: Inspirational
One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.Collection: Humanity
The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.Collection: Children
Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person - ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.Collection: Country
For nothing is fixed, 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 moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.Collection: Change
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.Collection: Eye
The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.Collection: Fit
I can't be a pessimist, because I am alive.Collection: Alive
If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.Collection: Thinking
To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.Collection: America
You cannot fix what you will not face.Collection: Self Improvement
You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.Collection: World
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.Collection: Love You
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.Collection: Mirrors
We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.Collection: World
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.Collection: Inspirational
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who 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 ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.Collection: Pain
A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.Collection: Civilization
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.Collection: Inspirational
Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you're afraid of the other side of the coin -- to love and be loved.Collection: Hate
Employment is my right my destiny.Collection: Destiny
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.Collection: New York
I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.Collection: Pain
We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Light
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. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.Collection: Country
The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is artCollection: Art
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.Collection: Life
I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.Collection: Eye
It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.Collection: Gratitude
One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.Collection: Blow
There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to performCollection: Believe
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Art
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go somewhere else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That's how the country was settled.Collection: Country
Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.Collection: Justice
There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.Collection: People
The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.Collection: Morning
A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.Collection: Risk
The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.Collection: Faith
Great art can only be created out of love.Collection: Art
We can make America what America must become.Collection: America
All racists are irresponsible.Collection: Race
I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.Collection: Spiritual
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?Collection: House
There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.Collection: People
And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.Collection: Winning
A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.Collection: Artist