James Baldwin quotes

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

— James Baldwin

“The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

“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.”

— James Baldwin

“People can cry much easier than they can change.”

— James Baldwin

“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”

— James Baldwin

“The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

“No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.”

— James Baldwin

“The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.”

— James Baldwin

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”

— James Baldwin

“The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.”

— James Baldwin

“The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”

— James Baldwin

“The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.”

— James Baldwin

“There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

“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.”

— James Baldwin

“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.”

— James Baldwin

“When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.”

— James Baldwin

“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.”

— James Baldwin

“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.”

— James Baldwin

“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.”

— James Baldwin

“The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”

— James Baldwin

“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.”

— James Baldwin

“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.”

— James Baldwin

“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.”

— James Baldwin

“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.”

— James Baldwin