Famous James Baldwin Quotations

First 1 Last 
"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers."
by James A. Baldwin
"The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black."
by James A. 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."
by James A. Baldwin
"The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone."
by James A. Baldwin
"There is a ''sanctity'' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it."
by James A. Baldwin
"We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours."
by James A. Baldwin
"If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live."
by James A. Baldwin
"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."
by James A. 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."
by James A. Baldwin
"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."
by James A. Baldwin
"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
by James Baldwin
"It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate."
by James A. Baldwin
"It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless."
by James A. Baldwin
"It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."
by James A. Baldwin
"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."
by James Baldwin
"I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."
by James Baldwin
"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."
by James Arthur 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."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled."
by James A. Baldwin
"Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"Beyond talent lie all the usual words discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance."
by James Baldwin
"Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need a sense of life's possibilities."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given Freedom is something that people take and people are as free as they want to be."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery."
by James Mark Baldwin
"Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see."
by James Baldwin
"Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go."
by 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."
by James A. Baldwin
"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."
by James Baldwin
"Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didnt have it and thought of other things if you did."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"No one can possibly know what is about to happen it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
by 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."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"The future is like heaven - everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now."
by James Baldwin
"The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated."
by James A. Baldwin
"The price we pay when pursuing any art or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
by James Baldwin
"The price one pays for pursuing a profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"To defend one's self against fear is simply to ensure that one will, one day, be conquered by it fears must be faced."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way ... people look at reality, then you can change it."
by James Arthur Baldwin
"You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive."
by James Baldwin
"Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits."
by 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."
by James Baldwin
"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up."
by James Baldwin
"The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone."
by James Baldwin
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side."
by James Baldwin
"Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels."
by James Baldwin
"The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible."
by James Baldwin
"Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks."
by James Baldwin
"Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it."
by 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."
by James Baldwin
"Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair."
by 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."
by 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."
by James Baldwin
"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
by James Baldwin
"The future is... black."
by James Baldwin
"James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them."
by 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."
by James Baldwin
"An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger. Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes."
by James Baldwin
"The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land."
by James Baldwin
"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."
by James Baldwin
"We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real."
by 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."
by James Baldwin
"The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men."
by 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."
by 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."
by James Baldwin
"Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."
by 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."
by James Baldwin
"No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time."
by James Baldwin
"No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable."
by James Baldwin
"When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living."
by James Baldwin
"The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden -- as an unpatriotic act -- that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood."
by James Baldwin
"Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden."
by James Baldwin
"If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not."
by James Baldwin
"The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed."
by James Baldwin
"We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed."
by James Baldwin
"I imagine the reason that people hold on to hatred so stubbornly is because if the hate is removed, the pain will set in."
by James Baldwin
"Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this..."
by James Baldwin
"But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power."
by James Baldwin
"It is very nearly impossible ... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."
by 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."
by James Baldwin
"Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in to..."
by James Baldwin
"The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being edu..."
by James Baldwin


Hire a Writer