Quotes By James A. 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.

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.

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.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

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

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

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.

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.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

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

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

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

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.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

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

The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.

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.

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.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

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.

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.

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.

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

There is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.