Explore Quotes by James A. Baldwin

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.

The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art

I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years

You took the best, so why not take the rest?

The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

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.

Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

To hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first . . . acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are [;] . . . the second . . . that one must never, in one's life, accept . . . injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.

For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity

It comes as a great shock…to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance…has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.

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

People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.

The impossible is the least that one can demand.

No man is a devil in his own mind.