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James Baldwin

114 quotes

“Chicagoans talk about Mississippi as though they had no South Side. White people in New York talk about Alabama as though they had no Harlem. To ignore what is happening in their own back yard is a great device on the part of the white people.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If one could accept the fact that it is no longer important to be white, it would begin to cease to be important to be black. If we could accept the fact that no nation with 20 million black people in it for so long and with such a depth of involvement, that no nation under these circumstances can be called a white nation, this would be a great achievement, and it would change a great many things.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the reasons, for example, I think that our youth is so badly educated and it is inconceivably badly educated-is because education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. You have to teach some people to think; and in order to teach some people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything. There mustn't be something they can not think about. If there is one thing they can not think about, very shortly they can't think about anything.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you don't know what happened behind you, you've no idea of what is happening around you.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty — necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It demands great force and great cunning continually to assault the mighty and indifferent fortress of white supremacy, as Negroes in this country have done so long. It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The American war in Vietnam raises several questions. One is whether or not small nations, in this age of super-states and and live as they feel they should. For only the people of a superpowers, will be allowed to work out their own destinies country have the right, or the spiritual power, to determine that country's way of life.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Long, long before the Americans decided to liberate the Southeast Asians, they decided to liberate me: my ancestors carried these scars to the grave, and so will I. A racist society can't but fight a racist war-this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad, and every American Negro knows this, for he, after the American Indian, was the first "Viet Cong" victim. We were bombed first. How, then, can I believe a word you say, and what gives you the right to ask me to die for you?”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that mankind can do better than that, and I wish to be a witness to this small and stubborn possibility.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“a child’s major attention has to be concentrated on how to fit into a world which, with every passing hour, reveals itself as merciless.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, for the first time, I began to be aware of my heart, the heart itself: and with this awareness, conscious terror came. I realized that I knew nothing whatever about the way we are put together; and I realized that what I did not know might be in the process of killing me.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 the 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 (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Close up, the person's imperfections matter, but from far away, you see your own.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure’s inventions are soon exhausted. There must be a soul within the body you are holding, a soul which you are striving to meet, a soul which is striving to meet yours.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not merely that the rain falls differently on each of you, for that can be a wonder and a joy: it is that what is rain for the one is not rain for the other.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...but you were never really white in the first place. Nobody is. Nobody has, even, ever wanted to be white, unless they are afraid of being black. But being black is nothing to be afraid of. I knew that before I met you, and I have learned it again, through you. Perhaps being white is not a conceivable condition, but a terrifying fantasy, a moral choice.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I knew Richard Wright and I loved him. [...] I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology … because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The celebrity never sees himself. I have some idea what I'm doing on that stage; above all, I have some idea what sustains me on that stage. But the celebrity is not exactly Jimmy, though he comes out of Jimmy and Jimmy nourishes that, too. I can see now, with hindsight, that I would've had to become a celebrity in order to survive. A boy like me with all his handicaps, real and fancied, could not have survived in obscurity. I can say that it would have had to happen this way, though I could not see it coming.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the real point is that people like me and Harry Belafonte and even Martin Luther King are not Negro leaders. We're doing our best to find out where the people are and to follow them. (1963)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“recently I went along with a field secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. in Mississippi to investigate a murder that had been hushed up. We rode around through those back roads for hours talking to people who had known the dead man, trying to find out what had happened. And the Negroes talked to us as the German Jews must have talked when Hitler came to power. (1969)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lot of Negro style-the style of a man like Miles Davis or Ray Charles or the style of a man like myself is based on a knowledge of what people are really saying and on our refusal to hear it. You pick up on the beat, which is much more truthful than words. (1969)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What white Americans think is happening in the world and what black people must deal with day by day are very different. (1970)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(How do you see the role of the artist in general?) JB: The role of the artist is exactly the same role, I think, as the role of the lover. If you love somebody, you honor at least two necessities at once. One of them is to recognize something very dangerous, or very difficult. Many people cannot recognize it at all, that you may also be loved; love is like a mirror. In any case, if you do love somebody, you honor the necessity endlessly, and being at the mercy of that love, you try to correct the person whom you love. (1973)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are responsible to the future, and not to Chase Manhattan Bank. (1973)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There're two things we have to do love each other and raise our children. We have to do that! The alternative, for me, would be suicide. (1984)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I say a new language. I might say a new morality, which, in my terms, comes to the same thing. And that's on all levels the level of color, the level of identity, the level of sexual identity, what love means, especially in a consumer society, for example. Everything is in question, according to me. One has to forge a new language to deal with it. (1984)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I'm still learning how to write. I don't know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac. (1984)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps the turning point in one's life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one. (1984)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(You seem very troubled but not by death?) JB: Yes, true, but not at all by death. I'm troubled over getting my work done and over all the things I've not learned. It's useless to be troubled by death, because then, of course, you can't live at all. (1984)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(“How do you assess the results of the war in Vietnam on the American people?”) Americans are terrified. For the first time they know that they are capable of genocide. History is built on genocide. But they can't face it. And it doesn't make any difference what Americans think that they think-they are terrified. (1985)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not a black nationalist but some of my best friends are...Why aren't I a black nationalist? Because I don't believe it is enough to be black-one has to be human as well. We did not struggle for four hundred years just to become like the white man". (1985)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...the world is present, and the world is not white, and America is not the symbol of civilization. Neither is England. Neither is France. Something else is happening that will engulf them by and by. You, Quincy, will be here, but I'll be gone. It's the only hope the world has-that Western hegemony and civilization be contained. (1988)”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) said by 1987 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who 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 ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Doom and glory of knowing who you are" by Jane Howard, in LIFE magazine, Vol. 54, No. 21 (May 24, 1963), p. 89; a part of this statement has often been quoted as it was paraphrased in The New York Times (J…
“It's no credit to this enormously rich country that there are more oppressive, less decent governments elsewhere. We claim superiority of our institutions. We ought to live up to our own standards, not use misery elsewhere as an endless source of self-gratification and justification. Of course, people tell me all the time in the West that they are trying, they are trying hard. Some have tears in their eyes and let me know how awful they feel about the way our poor live, our blacks, or those in dozens of other countries. 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 (1924–1987) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "James Baldwin Back Home" by Robert Coles in The New York Times (July 31, 1977)
“The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" in "The New York Times (July 29, 1979)