Top 500 James Baldwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “He laughed. ‘Baby. Baby. Baby. I love you. And I’m going to build us a table and a whole lot of folks are going to be eating off it for a long, long time to come.”

— James Baldwin

353. “One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”

— James Baldwin

354. “For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”

— James Baldwin

355. “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.”

— James Baldwin

356. “You smiled at me the way you smiled at everyone, you told me what you told everyone – and you tell nothing but lies. What are you always hiding? And do you think I did not know when you made love to me, you were making love to no one? No one! Or everyone – but not me, certainly. I am nothing to you, nothing, and you bring me fever but no delight.”

— James Baldwin

357. “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

358. “She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. It frightened her because she felt that he was reaching for the moon and that he would, therefore, be dashed down against the rocks; but she did not say any of this.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

360. “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs;.”

— James Baldwin

361. “Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous – dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

363. “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

364. “Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.”

— James Baldwin

365. “Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

368. “These captive men are the hidden price for a hiden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.”

— James Baldwin

369. “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

370. “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

371. “The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.”

— James Baldwin

372. “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

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

— James Baldwin

374. “The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”

— James Baldwin

375. “Time could not be bought. The only coin time accepted was life.”

— James Baldwin

376. “All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.”

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

378. “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

379. “The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.”

— James Baldwin

380. “I doesn’t do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can’t be reached.”

— James Baldwin

381. “The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.”

— James Baldwin

382. “In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and.”

— James Baldwin

383. “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

384. “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

385. “When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.”

— James Baldwin

386. “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

387. “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

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

— James Baldwin

389. “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

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

— James Baldwin

391. “For a woman,” she said, “I think a man is always a stranger. And there’s something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger.”

— James Baldwin

392. “Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins.”

— James Baldwin

393. “Men do not like to be protected, it emasculates them. This is what black men know, it is the reality they have lived with; it is what white men do not want to know. It is not a pretty thing to be a father and be ultimately dependent on the power and kindness of some other man for the well-being of your house.”

— James Baldwin

394. “If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save.”

— James Baldwin

395. “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

396. “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

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

— James Baldwin

398. “His body, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and thickened the air between us. Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me.”

— James Baldwin

399. “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

400. “I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away.”

— James Baldwin