James Baldwin Quotes

246 Sourced Quotes

A man's balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.

James Baldwin
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

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
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

James Baldwin
Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.

James Baldwin
There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

James Baldwin
There was no room in God's army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God's will. Let the church cry amen to this!

James Baldwin
I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I do not expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.

James Baldwin
Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as they very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might intimidiating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope.

James Baldwin
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

James Baldwin
Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.

James Baldwin
The moral authority in the Western world is gone. And it is gone forever. It is gone, not because of the criminal record—everybody's record is criminal. It is gone because you cannot do one thing and pretend you're doing another! None of us, who are sitting around in some of the true limbo out-of-space, which we call "now," waiting to be saved, civilized, or discovered, have the moral authority to say anything.

James Baldwin
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

James Baldwin
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

James Baldwin
The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white—and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less.

James Baldwin
Every form is difficult, no one is easier than another. They all kick your ass.

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

James Baldwin
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

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
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.

James Baldwin
I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?

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
Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

James Baldwin
I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

James Baldwin
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.

James Baldwin