“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
— James Baldwin
“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
“To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.”
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
“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.”
“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.”
“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”
“Artists are here to disturb the peace.”
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.”
“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”
“The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
“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.”
“I can’t be a pessimist, because I am alive.”
“You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”
“I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.”
“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
“If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.”
“We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.”
“You cannot fix what you will not face.”
“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”
“Recognizing a problem doesn’t always bring a solution, but until we recognize that problem, there can be no solution.”
“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
“People can cry much easier than they can change.”
“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.”
“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
“If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.”
“For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.”
“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”
“Writing is a political instrument.”
“In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.”
“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”
“We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.”
“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.”
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
“The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”
“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”
“Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.”
“You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.”
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
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