Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.”

— James Baldwin

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— James Baldwin

160. “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

161. “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

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

— James Baldwin

163. “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

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

— James Baldwin

165. “Don’t let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

167. “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

168. “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”

— James Baldwin

169. “Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.”

— James Baldwin

170. “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

171. “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

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

— James Baldwin

173. “The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it ‘ominous’ when black people even talk of having rifles? Why don’t we have the right to self-defense? Is it because maybe you know we’re going to have to defend ourselves against you?”

— James Baldwin

174. “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— James Baldwin

182. “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

183. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

186. “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

187. “The people in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else. No amount of “improvement” can sweeten this fact. Whatever money is now being earmarked to improve this, or any other ghetto, might as well be burnt. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.”

— James Baldwin

188. “If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.”

— James Baldwin

189. “Whose little boy are you?”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

191. “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

192. “A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

195. “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

196. “When the book comes out it may hurt you – but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.”

— James Baldwin

197. “It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.”

— James Baldwin

198. “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

199. “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

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

— James Baldwin