Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

153. “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.”

— James Baldwin

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

163. “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

164. “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

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

— James Baldwin

166. “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

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

— James Baldwin

168. “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

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

— James Baldwin

170. “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

171. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

174. “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

175. “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

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

— James Baldwin

177. “Whose little boy are you?”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

179. “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

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

— James Baldwin

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— James Baldwin

185. “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

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

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

— James Baldwin

189. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

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