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

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

— James Baldwin

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— James Baldwin

358. “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

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

— James Baldwin

360. “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

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

— James Baldwin

362. “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

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

— James Baldwin

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

371. “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

372. “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

373. “All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.”

— James Baldwin

374. “People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.”

— James Baldwin

375. “Somebody,” said Jacques, “your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour – and in the oddest places! – for the lack of it.”

— James Baldwin

376. “Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.”

— James Baldwin

377. “I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.”

— James Baldwin

378. “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

379. “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

380. “The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet: The clouds that gather round the setting sun 19 Do take a sober coloring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won.”

— James Baldwin

381. “The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic – a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.”

— James Baldwin

382. “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.”

— James Baldwin

383. “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

384. “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

385. “No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide.”

— James Baldwin

386. “Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors.”

— James Baldwin

387. “In Africa, he said, there was none whatever. Africans do not, in fact, believe that Christianity is any longer real for Europeans, due to the immense scaffolding with which they have covered it, and the fact that this religion has no effect whatever on their conduct.”

— James Baldwin

388. “The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn’t know, any more than the mind does, why what clings to it clings.”

— James Baldwin

389. “People who cling to their illusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.”

— James Baldwin

390. “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

391. “The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”

— James Baldwin

392. “But it is part of the business of the writer – as I see it – to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.”

— James Baldwin

393. “The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.”

— James Baldwin

394. “The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead. “I’m going, Ma,” she said. “I got to go.”

— James Baldwin

395. “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

396. “The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”

— James Baldwin

397. “The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace.”

— James Baldwin

398. “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

399. “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

400. “I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this point, is all that can carry me out of it.”

— James Baldwin