James Baldwin Quotes

Now I think there is a very good reason why the Negro in this country has been treated for such a long time in such a cruel way, and some of the reasons are economic and some of them are political. We...

Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs--which are, re...

Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck...

One would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance… totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of thi...

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...

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. T...

Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.

Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicio...

Perhaps the best way to sum all this up is to say that the people I knew felt, mainly, a peculiar kind of relief when they knew that their boys were being shipped out of the south, to do battle overse...

Richard and I seemed really to be at the end of our rope, for he had done what he could for me, and it had not worked out, and now he was going away. It seemed to me that he was sailing into the most...

She marched into the street, found a liquor store and bought a bottle; and the weight of the bottle in her straw handbag somehow made everything real; as the purchase of a railroad ticket proves the i...

So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each othe...

That door is the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body. It’s getting late. The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under...

The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors. The Muslims react to this fact by referring to the Negro as the so-called American Negro and substituting...

The distance between us, and I had never thought of this before, was that they did not know this, and I now dared to realize that I loved them more than they loved me. And I do not mean that my love w...

The fear that I heard in my father's voice... when he realized that I really believed I could do, anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I h...

The fear that I heard in my father’s voice, for example, when he realized that I really I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I...

The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over.

The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bondsmen and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures. Of course, they’re not any richer than the poor, really, that’s...

The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.