People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.
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...
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...
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...
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;...
Love him,' said Jacques, with vehemence, 'love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
It’s a strange thing to dream of faraway places, only to find when I reach them, I am dreaming of home. The affliction of the dreamer, I suppose.
It was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knowest this man's fall, but thou knowest not his wrassling.
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 had been so once; it had almost been so once. I could make it so again, I could make it real. It only demanded a short, hard strength for me to become myself again.
In order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is.
If you have been watching television lately, I think this is unendurably clear in the faces of those screaming people in the South, who are quite incapable of telling you what it is they are afraid of...
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. I
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...
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.
I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room.
I remember what it was like...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.James Baldwin
I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this point, is all that can carry me out of it.
I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of a bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past, I did not fin...
I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch—I hoped to drive out fire with fire.