Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “Being in the pulpit, was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked.”

— James Baldwin

152. “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

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

— James Baldwin

154. “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

155. “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

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

— James Baldwin

157. “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

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

— James Baldwin

159. “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

160. “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

161. “Whose little boy are you?”

— James Baldwin

162. “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

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

— James Baldwin

164. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

167. “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

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

— James Baldwin

169. “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

170. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

173. “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

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

— James Baldwin

175. “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

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

— James Baldwin

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— James Baldwin

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.”

— James Baldwin

190. “Employment is my right my destiny.”

— James Baldwin

191. “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

192. “All art is a kind of confession.”

— James Baldwin

193. “I’m beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn’t make sense, how could it happen?”

— James Baldwin

194. “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

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

— James Baldwin

196. “If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it bring must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.”

— James Baldwin

197. “If we understood ourselves better we would damage ourselves less.”

— James Baldwin

198. “It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.”

— James Baldwin

199. “I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.”

— James Baldwin

200. “There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.”

— James Baldwin