Quotes By James A. Baldwin

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

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.

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.

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.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

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

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

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

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

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.