Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.”

— James Baldwin

302. “Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”

— James Baldwin

303. “There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on deathbeds...”

— James Baldwin

304. “The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.”

— James Baldwin

305. “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

— James Baldwin

306. “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”

— James Baldwin

307. “I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”

— James Baldwin

308. “I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me.”

— James Baldwin

309. “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

310. “She, who had descended with such joy and pain, had begun her upward climb – upward, with her baby, on the steep, steep side of the mountain.”

— James Baldwin

311. “Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.”

— James Baldwin

312. “Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.”

— James Baldwin

313. “People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.”

— James Baldwin

314. “Perhaps the best way to sum all this up is to say that the people I knew felt, mainly, a peculiar kind of relief when they knew that their boys were being shipped out of the south, to do battle overseas. It was, perhaps, like feeling that the most dangerous part of a dangerous journey had been passed and that now, even if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen. Such a death would be, in short, a fact with which one could hope to live.”

— James Baldwin

315. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by burning witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob.”

— James Baldwin

316. “We live in a nation of pigs and murderers.”

— James Baldwin

317. “A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents’ voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them.”

— James Baldwin

318. “The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.”

— James Baldwin

319. “Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say. I.”

— James Baldwin

320. “You don’t realize that you’re intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”

— James Baldwin

321. “From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. 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

322. “Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.”

— James Baldwin

323. “And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played – and play – in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know. The.”

— James Baldwin

324. “It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.”

— James Baldwin

325. “If all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination.”

— James Baldwin

326. “In the first place, as the homeless wanderers of the twentieth century prove, the question of nationality no longer necessarily involves the question of allegiance. Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.”

— James Baldwin

327. “It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.”

— James Baldwin

328. “I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe.”

— James Baldwin

329. “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

330. “The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.”

— James Baldwin

331. “Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path.”

— James Baldwin

332. “The world should listen then, as I am listening now.”

— James Baldwin

333. “There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.”

— James Baldwin

334. “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

335. “What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them.”

— James Baldwin

336. “But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren’t any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?”

— James Baldwin

337. “Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception.”

— James Baldwin

338. “It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”

— James Baldwin

339. “We had our arms round each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.”

— James Baldwin

340. “They say the kids are dumb and so they’re teaching them to work with their hands. Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure that they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.”

— James Baldwin

341. “Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father’s face, for behind your father’s face as it is today are all those other faces which were his.”

— James Baldwin

342. “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.”

— James Baldwin

343. “Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.”

— James Baldwin

344. “If you really want to know something about solitude, become famous.”

— James Baldwin

345. “The world sees what it wishes to see, or, when the chips are down, what you tell it to see: it does not wish to see who, or what, or why you are.”

— James Baldwin

346. “I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing!”

— James Baldwin

347. “He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear.”

— James Baldwin

348. “Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him ‘Touch’ me again. Then, when he ‘Touched’ me, I thought, it doesn’t matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over, I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the ‘Touch’ of hands, of Giovanni’s hands, or anybody’s hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.”

— James Baldwin

349. “In America, though, life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet. Just.”

— James Baldwin

350. “It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.”

— James Baldwin