James Baldwin
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Memorial
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.Collection: Music
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.Collection: Education
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.Collection: History
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.Collection: Positive
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.Collection: History
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Men
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.Collection: Power
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.Collection: Experience
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.Collection: Experience
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.Collection: Love
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.Collection: Independence
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.Collection: Relationship
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.Collection: Hope
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.Collection: Society
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.Collection: Time
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.Collection: Good
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.Collection: Experience
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.Collection: Power
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Relationship
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.Collection: Money
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.Collection: Age
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?Collection: Love
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Respect
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.Collection: Time
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.Collection: History
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.Collection: Future
People can cry much easier than they can change.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Failure
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.Collection: Society
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.Collection: History
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
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.
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
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.
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
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.
The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.