James Baldwin: Trending quotes (page 7)

“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.”

“To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”

“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.”

“Artists are here to disturb the peace.”

“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”

“I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”

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

“Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.”

“We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.”

“Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

“There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.”

“After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.”

“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.”

“In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.”

“Whose little boy are you?”

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

“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.”

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