James A. Baldwin

It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.

The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.

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

The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

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

Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

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.

We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

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

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.

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

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

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, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason... Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are.