James Baldwin Quotes

I kissed her salty tears and murmured, murmured I don’t know what. I felt her body straining, straining to meet mine and I felt my own contracting and drawing away and I knew that I had begun the long...

I remember what it was...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.

I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Savior had met in me. [...] And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me again—unless, indeed, thi...

I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

If dirty words frighten you, said Giovanni, I really do not know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when t...

If you think of them as dirty, then they be dirty- they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing

In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the jurie...

In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and

In the beginning—and neither can this be overstated—a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that...

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect...

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

It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce h...

It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same re...

It was Southern, therefore, to put it brutally, because of the history of America—the United States of America: and small black boys and girls were now paying for this holocaust. They were attempting...

Malcolm considered himself to be the spiritual property of the people who produced him. He did not consider himself to be their saviour, he was far too modest for that, and gave that role to another;...

Men do not like to be protected, it emasculates them. This is what black men know, it is the reality they have lived with; it is what white men do not want to know. It is not a pretty thing to be a fa...

Negroes know about each other what can here be called family secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he wishes, can knock the other’s hustle—can give his game away. It is still not possible to over...

Now, for the first time, I began to be aware of my heart, the heart itself: and with this awareness, conscious terror came. I realized that I knew nothing whatever about the way we are put together; a...

On the contrary, we have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so despera...