Explore Quotes by James A. Baldwin

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.

I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

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

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

Everybody's 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.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

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.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

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.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

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.

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.

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.