Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

— James Baldwin

2. “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”

— James Baldwin

Featured in: Quotes About Believing

3. “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.”

— James Baldwin

4. “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.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

6. “Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”

— James Baldwin

7. “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.”

— James Baldwin

Featured in: Country Quotes

8. “Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

10. “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.”

— James Baldwin

Featured in: Artist Quotes

11. “Artists are here to disturb the peace.”

— James Baldwin

Featured in: Artist Quotes

12. “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

— James Baldwin

13. “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.”

— James Baldwin

Featured in: Broken Heart Quotes, Quotes About Growing Up, Romantic Quotes

14. “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.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

16. “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.”

— James Baldwin

Featured in: Forgiveness Quotes

17. “You cannot fix what you will not face.”

— James Baldwin

Featured in: Self-Improvement Quotes

18. “You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”

— James Baldwin

19. “The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”

— James Baldwin

20. “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.”

— James Baldwin

21. “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.”

— James Baldwin

22. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

— James Baldwin

23. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

26. “I can’t be a pessimist, because I am alive.”

— James Baldwin

27. “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.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

29. “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.”

— James Baldwin

30. “I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.”

— James Baldwin

31. “Recognizing a problem doesn’t always bring a solution, but until we recognize that problem, there can be no solution.”

— James Baldwin

32. “A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

— James Baldwin

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization

33. “We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.”

— James Baldwin

34. “If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.”

— James Baldwin

35. “For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.”

— James Baldwin

36. “People can cry much easier than they can change.”

— James Baldwin

Featured in: Self-Improvement Quotes

37. “In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.”

— James Baldwin

38. “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

40. “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

— James Baldwin

41. “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.”

— James Baldwin

42. “Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”

— James Baldwin

43. “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

Featured in: Country Quotes

45. “Writing is a political instrument.”

— James Baldwin

46. “You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.”

— James Baldwin

47. “Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.”

— James Baldwin

48. “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.”

— James Baldwin

49. “Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.”

— James Baldwin

50. “Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.”

— James Baldwin