Quotes By James A. Baldwin

People can cry much easier than they can change.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

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.

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.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

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.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

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, or who had ever been alive.

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.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

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.

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

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.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.