James Baldwin Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
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I took my acting very seriously. I did over 40 films, and naturally, some of them were called B-movies because the woman was at the top of the billing. Women couldn't star in their own movies.
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Let that which stood in front go behind, let that which was behind advance to the front, let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions, let the old propositions be postponed.
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Should the time come when the county family will be taken away, then the parish will feel for some time like a mouth from which a molar has been drawn - there will be a vacancy that will cause unrest and discomfort.
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Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
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It is fairly well-known what has been behind that climate change denial in America: vast sums pumped into an ignorance industry by the oil and gas lobbies.
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A guitar riff played on a piano doesn't come close to the purity of it being played on a guitar but I faked it enough to get by.
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When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That's the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older.
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Wal-mart... do they like make walls there?
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That's why I'm really trying to produce my own stuff. This film was so good, because I produced it myself, and developed it, and made it with New Line, which is a smaller studio, so I was in control of a lot of stuff that I wasn't in control of for my other films.
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Black women, whose experience is unique, are seldom recognized as a particular social-cultural entity and are seldom thought to be important enough for serious scholarly consideration.
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If I didn't have a girlfriend, I'd have 10 girls at the studio, and they would make me not rap.
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The Bible says, 'Judge not lest ye be judged.' Our lives are supposed to be hospitals, not courtrooms.
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'Islamism' itself is such a broad and nearly meaningless word as used by the mainstream Western press, including everything from Turkey's AKP party to al Qaeda.
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If you're a designer, there's got to be some films that you've seen that have inspired you creatively. There's no escaping that.
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Any reaction is better than none.
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There are things that bother me. I try not to let them, but they do.
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A man with a million dollars can be as happy nowadays as though he were rich.
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The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.
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I'm very much a traditionalist, but I think it's important to know about tradition so that you can evolve the music you are deciding to make.
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The function of music is to release us from the boredom of existence.
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You can tell when someone is just trying to use you. It becomes just someone who's hanging around. Whenever someone sucks up to me, it never goes anywhere because I'm too boring a guy.
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The English playwrights of the '50s and '60s didn't really keep writing or getting produced, while the Irish did. There's encouragement for the younger ones also in the fact that Ireland is exceptional in its ability to make theater part of the national dialogue, and it reaches to all four corners of the country.
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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.
