Quotes By James A. Baldwin

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

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

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

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.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

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.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

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.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

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.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

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.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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