Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Hatred destroys the person who hates.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

253. “I ain’t ashamed of it – I’m ashamed of you – you done made me feel a shame I ain’t never felt before. I shamed before my God – to let somebody make me cheap, like you done done.”

— James Baldwin

254. “In the culture to be born there will no doubt be old and new elements. How these elements will be mixed is not a question to which any individual can respond. The response must be given by the community. But we can say this: that the response will be given, and not verbally, but in tangible facts, and by action.”

— James Baldwin

255. “We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth.”

— James Baldwin

256. “There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.”

— James Baldwin

257. “I have been carried into precinct basements often enough, and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.”

— James Baldwin

258. “I did not know, however, that ancient glories imply, at least in the middle of the present century, present fatigue and, quite probably, paranoia; that there is a limit to the role of intelligence in human affairs; and that no people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.”

— James Baldwin

259. “Furthermore, it is now absolutely clear that white people are a minority in the world – so severe a minority that they now look rather more like an invention – and that they cannot possibly hope to rule it any longer. If this is so, why is it not also possible that they achieved their original dominance by stealth and cunning and bloodshed and in opposition to the will of Heaven, and not, as they claim, by Heaven’s will?”

— James Baldwin

260. “The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.”

— James Baldwin

261. “When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.”

— James Baldwin

262. “The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not.”

— James Baldwin

263. “It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of the imagination, made one’s own.”

— James Baldwin

264. “A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.”

— James Baldwin

265. “Vile as I am,” states one of the characters in Dostoevski’s The Idiot, “I don’t believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity. For the wagons that bring bread to humanity, without any moral basis for conduct, may coldly exclude a considerable part of humanity from enjoying what is brought; so it has been already.”

— James Baldwin

266. “Assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism. These relations demanded that the individual, torn from the context to which he owed his identity, should replace his habits of feeling, thinking, and acting by another set of habits which belonged to the strangers who dominated him.”

— James Baldwin

267. “The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another – or others – always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch.”

— James Baldwin

268. “White people are trapped in a history they don’t understand” and “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

— James Baldwin

269. “But he had the tendency of all wildly disorganised people to suppose that the lives of others were tamer and less sensual and more cerebral than his own.”

— James Baldwin

270. “I don’t know any writers who don’t drink.”

— James Baldwin

271. “Little breezes dusk 3 and shiver Through the wave that runs forever By the island in the river Flowing down to Camelot; Four gray walls, and four gray towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott.”

— James Baldwin

272. “Man cannot live by profit alone.”

— James Baldwin

273. “One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. The.”

— James Baldwin

274. “One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”

— James Baldwin

275. “I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty.”

— James Baldwin

276. “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 brings must be borne.”

— James Baldwin

277. “The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

— James Baldwin

278. “The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.”

— James Baldwin

279. “The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.”

— James Baldwin

280. “People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.”

— James Baldwin

281. “It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.”

— James Baldwin

282. “The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.”

— James Baldwin

283. “Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.”

— James Baldwin

284. “When the South has trouble with its Negroes when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” it blames “outside agitators” and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.”

— James Baldwin

285. “No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.”

— James Baldwin

286. “Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.”

— James Baldwin

287. “And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white.”

— James Baldwin

288. “Folks can change their ways much as they want to. But I don’t care how many times you change your ways, what’s in you is in you, and it’s got to come out.”

— James Baldwin

289. “Take no one’s word for anything, including mine – but trust your experience.”

— James Baldwin

290. “If the word integration means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”

— James Baldwin

291. “Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.”

— James Baldwin

292. “He was one of those people who, quick to laugh, are slow to anger; so that their anger, when it comes, is all the more impressive, seeming to leap from some unsuspected crevice like a fire which will bring the whole house down.”

— James Baldwin

293. “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.”

— James Baldwin

294. “People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.”

— James Baldwin

295. “He grins again, and everything inside me moves. Oh, love. Love.”

— James Baldwin

296. “The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.”

— James Baldwin

297. “After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.”

— James Baldwin

298. “We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.”

— James Baldwin

299. “I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.”

— James Baldwin

300. “A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.”

— James Baldwin