James Baldwin Quotes

You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

~ James Baldwin

That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.

~ James Baldwin

Ain't no such thing as a little fault or a big fault. Satan get his foot in the door, he ain't going to rest till he's in the room. You is in the Word or you ain't--ain't no halfway with God.

~ James Baldwin

...all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me...

~ James Baldwin

...when the black populations of the world have a future, so will the Western nations have a future-and not till then. But the terrible probability is that the Western populations, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen, and for which generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.

~ James Baldwin

I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever here may be, it must always happen here before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves.

~ James Baldwin

One of the things, though, that has always afflicted the American reality and the American vision is this aversion to history. History is not something you read about in a book, history is not even the past—it’s the present. Because everybody operates, whether or not we know it, out of assumptions which are produced and produced only by our history. Now the history of this country is not bloodier than other countries, but it’s bloody. It is not more criminal than that of other countries, but it’s criminal. Or in short, it’s not worse than the history of France or England or any country we can name—but it’s different.

~ James Baldwin

I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain.

~ James Baldwin

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

~ James Baldwin

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

~ James Baldwin

The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.

~ James Baldwin

But the conquest of the physical world is not man’s only duty. He is also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself. The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.

~ James Baldwin

People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility. (p. 81)

~ James Baldwin

That the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That's how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger-otherwise you can't be sure if you're safe.

~ James Baldwin

My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together— whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.

~ James Baldwin

Sin is the only heritage of the natural man...

~ James Baldwin

I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.

~ James Baldwin

[I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simplicity, it occurs to me, it has occurred to me more than once, in my somewhat stormy life, simplicity is taken to be a great American virtue, along with sincerity. And the result of this is, if you are simple-minded enough, you can become—I didn’t want to go that far [laughs]. And as long as you’re sincere in what you say, you haven’t got to know what you’re talking about. These are the American virtues—two of them anyway. One of the results of this is that immaturity is taken to be a virtue too.

~ James Baldwin

The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes— I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether— is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.

~ James Baldwin

We live in a nation of pigs and murderers.

~ James Baldwin

...they ain't never met nobody they didn't lie to and steal from.

~ James Baldwin

If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.

~ James Baldwin

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

~ James Baldwin

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.

~ James Baldwin

When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

~ James Baldwin

I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.

~ James Baldwin

We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.

~ 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.

~ 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.

~ James Baldwin

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them.

~ James Baldwin

Most people in action are not worth very much and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

~ James Baldwin

This world is white no longer and it will never be white again.

~ James Baldwin

It is a great shock at the age of 5 or 6 to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

~ James Baldwin

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.

~ James Baldwin

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

~ 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

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

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

~ James Baldwin