James Baldwin Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms 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.
~James Baldwin
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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
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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.
~James Baldwin
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An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
~James Baldwin
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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.
~James Baldwin
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But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
~James Baldwin
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It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
~James Baldwin
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The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
~James Baldwin
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The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
~James Baldwin
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
~James Baldwin
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It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
~James Baldwin
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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.
~James Baldwin
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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.
~James Baldwin
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It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
~James Baldwin
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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
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