Selected Quotes by James Baldwin
"The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat."
James Baldwin, Life
"If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him."
James Baldwin, Belief, Freedom, Love
"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."
James Baldwin, Intelligence/Wisdom, Power, Justice
"Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity."
James Baldwin, Society
"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, Life
"People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy."
James Baldwin, Society, Love, Death
"People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life."
James Baldwin, Life, Happiness
"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."
James Baldwin, Society
"It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."
James Baldwin, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
"There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain."
James Baldwin, Life
"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose."
James Baldwin, Society
"People can cry much easier than they can change."
James Baldwin, Life
"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."
James Baldwin, Wealth
"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, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."
James Baldwin, Life, Love
"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, Life
"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, Art
"I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do."
James Baldwin, Truth
"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."
James Baldwin, Goals
"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. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return."
James Baldwin, Life, Death
"Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition."
James Baldwin, Life
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
James Baldwin, Goals
"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, Life
"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
James Baldwin, Society
"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, Love
"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, Intelligence/Wisdom, Life
"I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.
I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine."
James Baldwin, Death
"You do not,’ cried Giovanni, sitting up, ‘love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody touch it—man or woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap—and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes, in the meantime.’ He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once: saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?"
James Baldwin, Love
"The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."
James Baldwin, Society
"Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."
James Baldwin, Goals
"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, Life
"Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?"
James Baldwin, Society
"The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it."
James Baldwin, Goals
"The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing."
James Baldwin, Society
"Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law."
James Baldwin, Life
"People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception."
James Baldwin, Life
"You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all."
James Baldwin, Life
"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."
James Baldwin, Life
"Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home."
James Baldwin, Goals
"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 breaking of bread."
James Baldwin, Life, Love
"Whoever debases others is debasing himself."
James Baldwin, Life
"I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world."
James Baldwin, Intelligence/Wisdom
"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, Life
"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."
James Baldwin, Life
"For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion."
James Baldwin, Life
"Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it."
James Baldwin, Love, Death
"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, Society, Love
"To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought."
James Baldwin, Life
"Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore."
James Baldwin, Life
"If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody."
James Baldwin, Life, Love, Death
"True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life."
James Baldwin, Life, Love, Goals
"Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind."
James Baldwin, Life, Love
"Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?"
"Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel."
"And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?"
James Baldwin, Time
"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, Art
"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."