James Baldwin Quotes
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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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Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. … Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
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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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Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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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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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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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
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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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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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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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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.