James Baldwin Quotes

246 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
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
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

James Baldwin
Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.

James Baldwin
The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.

James Baldwin
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

James Baldwin
It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.

James Baldwin
Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.

James Baldwin
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

James Baldwin
I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason... Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are.

James Baldwin
To hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first... acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are [;]... the second... that one must never, in one's life, accept... injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.

James Baldwin
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

James Baldwin
I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.

James Baldwin
The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs— as who has not?— of human love, God's love alone is left.

James Baldwin
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.

James Baldwin
If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only be setting someone free.

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

James Baldwin
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

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 will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.

James Baldwin
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

James Baldwin
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty...the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent humanity, the mark of cruelty.

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

James Baldwin
I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.

James Baldwin