Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world – which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white – owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged.”

— James Baldwin

452. “I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played – and play – in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.”

— James Baldwin

453. “The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks – the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.”

— James Baldwin

454. “Souvenez vous,” she tells me. “One must make a little prayer from time to time.”

— James Baldwin

455. “Assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism. These relations demanded that the individual, torn from the context to which he owed his identity, should replace his habits of feeling, thinking, and acting by another set of habits which belonged to the strangers who dominated him.”

— James Baldwin

456. “But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

— James Baldwin

457. “The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.”

— James Baldwin

458. “The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another – or others – always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch.”

— James Baldwin

459. “Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real.”

— James Baldwin

460. “He wished he could rescue her, that it was within his power to rescue her and make her life less hard. But it was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making a life bearable – only love, and love itself mostly failed; and he had never loved her. He had used her to find out something about himself. And even this was not true. He had used her in the hope of avoiding a confrontation with himself which he had, nevertheless, and with a vengeance, been forced to endure.”

— James Baldwin

461. “Time is just common, it’s like water for a fish. Everybody’s in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That’s all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn’t care.”

— James Baldwin

462. “The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace.”

— James Baldwin

463. “The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could not endure it.”

— James Baldwin

464. “She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn’t a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.”

— James Baldwin

465. “Men do not like to be protected, it emasculates them. This is what black men know, it is the reality they have lived with; it is what white men do not want to know. It is not a pretty thing to be a father and be ultimately dependent on the power and kindness of some other man for the well-being of your house.”

— James Baldwin

466. “The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.”

— James Baldwin

467. “The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.”

— James Baldwin

468. “I did not know, however, that ancient glories imply, at least in the middle of the present century, present fatigue and, quite probably, paranoia; that there is a limit to the role of intelligence in human affairs; and that no people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.”

— James Baldwin

469. “We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.”

— James Baldwin

470. “If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save.”

— James Baldwin

471. “One must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion.”

— James Baldwin

472. “People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else.”

— James Baldwin

473. “We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.”

— James Baldwin

474. “People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all – a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named – but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.”

— James Baldwin

475. “People love different people in different ways.”

— James Baldwin

476. “Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn’t want to admit. The discovery of one’s sexual preference doesn’t have to be a trauma. It’s a trauma because it’s such a traumatized society.”

— James Baldwin

477. “It is not a racial problem. It is a problem of whether or not you’re willing to look at your life and be responsible for it, and then begin to change it.”

— James Baldwin

478. “This lack of what may roughly be called social paranoia causes the American writer in Europe to feel – almost certainly for the first time in his life – that he can reach out to everyone, that he is accessible to everyone and open to everything. This is an extraordinary feeling. He feels, so to speak, his own weight, his own value.”

— James Baldwin

479. “People find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

— James Baldwin

480. “Years ago, when he was around fourteen, he’d been all hipped on the idea of going to India. He read books about people sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom. I used to say that it sounded to me as though they were getting away from wisdom as fast as they could. I think he sort of looked down on me for that.”

— James Baldwin

481. “Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.”

— James Baldwin

482. “It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.”

— James Baldwin

483. “A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State. The slaughter in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, was not merely the action of a mob.”

— James Baldwin

484. “A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.”

— James Baldwin

485. “They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening.”

— James Baldwin

486. “I don’t know any writers who don’t drink.”

— James Baldwin

487. “And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back.”

— James Baldwin

488. “It’s funny about people. Just before something happens, you almost know what it is. You do know what it is, I believe. You just haven’t had the time – and now you won’t have the time – to say it to yourself.”

— James Baldwin

489. “He wanted me to come home – to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.”

— James Baldwin

490. “The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not.”

— James Baldwin

491. “I wanted to say so many things. Yet when I opened my mouth, I made no sound. And yet – I do not know what I felt for Giovanni. I felt nothing for Giovanni, I felt terror and pity and a rising lust.”

— James Baldwin

492. “And as the boat-head wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her singing her last song, The Lady of Shalott. Heard a carol, mournful, holy, Chanted loudly, chanted lowly, Till her blood was frozen slowly, And her eyes were darkened wholly, Turned to towered Camelot; For ere she reached upon the tide The first house by the water-side, Singing in her song she died, The Lady of Shalott.”

— James Baldwin

493. “Little breezes dusk 3 and shiver Through the wave that runs forever By the island in the river Flowing down to Camelot; Four gray walls, and four gray towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott.”

— James Baldwin

494. “Because only an artist can tell and only an artist have told, since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone that gets this planet, to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die, what it is like to fear death, what is it like to fear, what it is like to love, what it is like to be glad.”

— James Baldwin

495. “What a great difference there is,′ she said, ’between dreaming of something and dealing with it!”

— James Baldwin

496. “All racists are irresponsible.”

— James Baldwin

497. “I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.”

— James Baldwin

498. “I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.”

— James Baldwin

499. “And then: ‘Here comes your baby. Sois sage. Sois chic.’ He moved slightly away and began talking to the boy next to him. And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars.”

— James Baldwin

500. “Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.”

— James Baldwin