James Baldwin

I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.

We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

Terrifying that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world and the loss of oneself.

You cannot fix what you will not face.

Europe has what we do not have yet a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life a sense in a word of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need a sense of lifes possibilities.

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.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn't, by an act of the imagination, made one's own.

Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world, it is better than bombing one out of it.

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.

Everybody’s journey is individual. You you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

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.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

Confusion is a luxury which only the very very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.

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.

Everybodys journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

The paradox of education is precisely this; that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

Know from whence you came because if you know from whence you came there is no limit to where you can go.

Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

We made the world we're living in and we have to make it over.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

Fathers and sons arrive at that relationship only by claiming that relationship that is by paying for it. If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

The vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live.

If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

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.

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.

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.

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

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.

If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected--those, precisely, who need the law's protection most!--and listens to their testimony.

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

You know fathers just have a way of putting everything together.