James Baldwin Quotes
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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, which is the only fact we have.
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When the South has trouble with its Negroes - when the Negroes refuse to remain in their 'place' - it blames 'outside agitators' and 'Northern interference.' When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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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.
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Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
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At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.
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The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
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I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.
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I knew Richard Wright and I loved him. ... I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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If any white man in the world says, 'Give me liberty or give me death,' the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won't be any more like him.
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If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.