Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”

— James Baldwin

102. “James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare – but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.”

— James Baldwin

103. “I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.”

— James Baldwin

104. “Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.”

— James Baldwin

105. “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.”

— James Baldwin

106. “Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.”

— James Baldwin

107. “Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.”

— James Baldwin

108. “The impossible is the least that one can demand.”

— James Baldwin

109. “The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”

— James Baldwin

110. “All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”

— James Baldwin

111. “The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.”

— James Baldwin

112. “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

— James Baldwin

113. “The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.”

— James Baldwin

114. “People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”

— James Baldwin

115. “The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

117. “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.”

— James Baldwin

118. “No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in society.”

— James Baldwin

119. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

— James Baldwin

120. “I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years.”

— James Baldwin

121. “The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”

— James Baldwin

122. “What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.”

— James Baldwin

123. “Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.”

— James Baldwin

124. “The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.”

— James Baldwin

125. “To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.”

— James Baldwin

126. “Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.”

— James Baldwin

127. “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.”

— James Baldwin

128. “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.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

131. “It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.”

— James Baldwin

132. “To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”

— James Baldwin

133. “Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.”

— James Baldwin

134. “I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes.”

— James Baldwin

135. “If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.”

— James Baldwin

136. “One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.”

— James Baldwin

137. “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

— James Baldwin

138. “He may be a very nice man. But I haven’t got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he’s got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That’s the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.”

— James Baldwin

139. “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.”

— James Baldwin

140. “Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”

— James Baldwin

141. “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.”

— James Baldwin

142. “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.”

— James Baldwin

143. “One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.”

— James Baldwin

144. “Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

147. “When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.”

— James Baldwin

148. “At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.”

— James Baldwin

149. “Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.”

— James Baldwin

150. “I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are so lost.”

— James Baldwin