James Baldwin Quotes

246 Sourced Quotes

The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.

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
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.

James Baldwin
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

James Baldwin
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

James Baldwin
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

James Baldwin
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

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
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

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

James Baldwin
Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.

James Baldwin
If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

James Baldwin
Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

James Baldwin
America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one's own sleep.

James Baldwin
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

James Baldwin
If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

James Baldwin
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.

James Baldwin
We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

James Baldwin
Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

James Baldwin
The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.

James Baldwin
There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

James Baldwin
But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

James Baldwin
But it was not the room's disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

James Baldwin
At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.

James Baldwin
A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.

James Baldwin