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James Baldwin

114 quotes

“Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Crusade of Indignation," The Nation (New York, July 7, 1956), published in book form in The Price of the Ticket (1985)
“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 (1924–1987) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Creative Process" (1962) originally published in The National Culture Center's Creative America (1962) and later published in The Price of the Ticket (1985)
“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As Much Truth As One Can Bear" in The New York Times Book Review (January 14, 1962); republished in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2011), edited by Randall Kenan
“I, for example, do not bring down property values when I move in. You bring them down when you move out.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: We Can Change the Country (1963). In "The Cross of Redemption
“Despair is a sin. I believe that. It is easy to be bleak about the human race, but there are people who have proved to me that we can be better than we are.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with M. S. Handler of the New York Times (3 June 1964), quoted in 'Demand For Presidential Lead On U.S. Race Issue', The Times (4 June 1963), p. 10
“One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found — and it is found in terrible places. … For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From Nothing Personal, a collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon (1964). Baldwin's text for the volume can be found "here".
“Leaving aside all the physical facts which one can quote, leaving aside rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalog of oppression, which we are in one way too familiar with already—what this does to the subjugated, the most private, the most serious thing this does to the subjugated, is to destroy his sense of reality. It destroys, for example, his father's authority over him. His father can no longer tell him anything, because the past has disappeared, and his father has no power in the world.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Debate with William F. Buckley Jr. at the on the subject "Has the American Dream Been Achieved at the Expense of the American Negro?", televised by NET (1965)
“It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn't make a right, either. People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White" in The New York Times (April 9, 1967)
“When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says “give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won't be any more like him.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: on The Dick Cavett Show (1968), as reproduced in I Am Not Your Negro: A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film (2017)
“You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: James Baldwin and Margaret Mead: A Rap on Race, p. 95. J. B. Lippincott, 1971.
“The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From chapter one of The Devil Finds Work (orig. pub. 1976), reprinted in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985
“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 (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Trapped Inside James Baldwin" by Michael Anderson, a review of Baldwin's Collected Essays in The New York Times (March 29, 1998)
“All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Harlem Ghetto" originally in Commentary (February 1948)
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notes of a Native Son" originally in Harper's (November 1955)
“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I shall never be able to have any more of these boyish, zestful affairs — which are, really, when one thinks about it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,' Jacques said. And then: 'I wonder why.' I have thought about Jacques' question since. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road — and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright — and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden. Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'I don't believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.'”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'And, at the risk of losing forever your so remarkably candid friendship, let me tell you something. Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford, and you are not that young any more.'”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am beginning to feel like part of a travelling circus.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'You think,' he persisted, 'that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself why they are.' 'Why are they — shameful?' I asked him. 'Because there is no affection in them, and no joy. It's like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.'”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'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 (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She is smiling and her eyes are kind but now the smile is purely social”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker, and so you can stand less and less.'”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was silent for a long while. Then: 'You do, sometimes, remind me of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car.'”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'I felt so aimless — like a tennis ball, bouncing, bouncing — I began to wonder where I'd land.'”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He didn’t seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother’s head like the very cup of trembling.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Faulkner and Desegregation" originally in Partisan Review (Fall 1956)
“I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I do not expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Hard Kind of Courage" in Harper's (October 1958) republished as "A Fly in Buttermilk
“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman" in Esquire (April 1960); republished as "The Northern Protestant", also in The Price of the Ticket (1985)
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem" originally in Esquire (July 1960)
“At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Negro Assays on the Negro Mood," The New York Times (March 12, 1961), published in the collection as "East River, Downtown: Postscript to a Letter from Harlem
“I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Search of a Majority" address delivered at Kalamazoo College (February 1960)
“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Search of a Majority: An Address" (Feb 1960)
“The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The roles that we construct are constructed because we feel that they will help us to survive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, therefore, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it. All roles are dangerous. The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. (p. 21)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source