Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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.”

— James Baldwin

152. “It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.”

— James Baldwin

153. “I really do believe in the New Jerusalem. I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous and people are not yet willing to pay it.”

— James Baldwin

154. “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”

— James Baldwin

155. “Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?”

— James Baldwin

156. “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.”

— James Baldwin

157. “The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.”

— James Baldwin

158. “Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty – necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.”

— James Baldwin

159. “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

— James Baldwin

160. “But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.”

— James Baldwin

161. “Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.”

— James Baldwin

162. “Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.”

— James Baldwin

163. “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”

— James Baldwin

164. “Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.”

— James Baldwin

165. “It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians is you.”

— James Baldwin

166. “Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.”

— James Baldwin

167. “This is the charged, the dangerous moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new, when nothing at all can be taken for granted.”

— James Baldwin

168. “He made me think of home – perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

— James Baldwin

169. “Whose little boy are you?”

— James Baldwin

170. “Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.”

— James Baldwin

171. “You took the best, so why not take the rest?”

— James Baldwin

172. “We can make America what America must become.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

174. “Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.”

— James Baldwin

175. “The root of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply wants them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children’s way.”

— James Baldwin

176. “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.”

— James Baldwin

177. “Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.”

— James Baldwin

178. “Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home any more. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.”

— James Baldwin

179. “There is something terribly radical about believing that one’s own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform.”

— James Baldwin

180. “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”

— James Baldwin

181. “To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.”

— James Baldwin

182. “Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.”

— James Baldwin

183. “It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.”

— James Baldwin

184. “When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.”

— James Baldwin

185. “The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

— James Baldwin

186. “White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded – at least, in the same way.”

— James Baldwin

187. “Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.”

— James Baldwin

188. “History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.”

— James Baldwin

189. “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.”

— James Baldwin

190. “Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”

— James Baldwin

191. “I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.”

— James Baldwin

192. “One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself – that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.”

— James Baldwin

193. “The American soil is full of corpses of my ancestors– through 400 years and at least three wars. Why is my freedom, my citizenship, in question now?”

— James Baldwin

194. “For here you were, Big James, named for me – you were a big baby, I was not – here you were, to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.”

— James Baldwin

195. “An identity is questioned only when it is menaced... Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self...”

— James Baldwin

196. “There is no reason for you try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”

— James Baldwin

197. “It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less.”

— James Baldwin

198. “There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.”

— James Baldwin

199. “If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impassable with our bodies the corridors to the gas chamber. For if they come for you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

— James Baldwin

200. “So what can we really do for each other except – just love each other and be each other’s witness? And haven’t we got the right to hope – for more? So that we can really stretch into whoever we really are?”

— James Baldwin