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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 8bf7278 | A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents' voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them. | James Baldwin | ||
| fce8d09 | From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms. White | James Baldwin | ||
| 058d020 | Tell me...is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark? Think...of the men who have kneeled before you while you thought of something else and pretended that nothing was happening down there in the dark between your legs. | James Baldwin | ||
| fa829b3 | Why no," he said, reasonably, and looked at his watch, "we can wait another hour if you like. We can become friends then. Or we can wait until closing time. We can become friends then. Or we can wait until tomorrow, only that means that you must come in here tomorrow and perhaps you have something else to do." He put his watch away and leaned both elbows on the bar. "Tell me," he said, "what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 12b4a38 | 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 juries, the shotguns, the law--in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holdi.. | James Baldwin | ||
| e11791e | I did not tell him my decision, that would have broken my will. I did not wait to have breakfast with him but only drank some coffee and made an excuse to go home. I knew the excuse did not fool Joey; but he did not know how to protest or insist; he did not know that this was all he needed to have done. Then I, who had seen him that summer nearly every day till then, no longer went to see him. He did not come to see me. I would have been ve.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 30b6e3e | My novel's about Brooklyn." "The tree? Or the kids or the murderers or the junkies?" Vivaldo swallowed. "All of them." "That's quite an assignment. And if you don't mind my saying so, it sounds just a little bit old fashioned." He put his hand before his mouth and burped. "Brooklyn's been done. And done." | writing | James Baldwin | |
| 507b6af | The vision people hold of the world to come is but a reflection, with predictable wishful distortions, of the world in which they live. | heaven religion wishful-thinking | James Baldwin | |
| d3883a3 | The real troubles with living is that living is so banal. | life living | James Baldwin | |
| e32d2f8 | In the Negro world, as in the white world, Negroes who have money band together and try to ignore the existence of their unluckier brothers. That is the way the love of money works. But neither money, nor the love of it, is the root of all evil. The importance of money is simply that power in the world does not exist without it and power in the world is what almost everyone would like to have. | James Baldwin | ||
| d425eba | Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say. I | James Baldwin | ||
| f149229 | It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant--birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so--and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths--change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not--safety, for example, or mon.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1a4d873 | It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love. | James Baldwin | ||
| 4f96cd7 | Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real. | James Baldwin | ||
| 7c980ee | And his mind could not contain the terrible stretch of time that united twelve men fishing by the shores of Galilee, and black men weeping on their knees tonight, and he, a witness. | James Baldwin | ||
| fb2546b | Come out, come out, wherever you are! | James Baldwin | ||
| 9e27145 | I am not trying to be mechant when I talk about women. I respect women--very much--for their inside life, which is not like the life of a man. | James Baldwin | ||
| 6676840 | The paradox of education is precisely this--that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. --JAMES BALDWIN | Carl Hart | ||
| a19bb7a | There is nothing more boring, anyway, than sexual activity as an end in itself, and a great many people who came out of the closet should reconsider. | James Baldwin | ||
| d2d282c | Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master. They had, the masters, incontestably, the rope--in time, with enough, they would hang themselves with it. They were not to hang : I was to see to that. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5151f9e | The menfolk, they die, all right. And it's us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8b49a27 | Folks can change their ways much as they want to. But I don't care how many times you change your ways, what's in you is in you, and it's got to come out. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8a52824 | He was one of those people who, quick to laugh, are slow to anger; so that their anger, when it comes, is all the more impressive, seeming to leap from some unsuspected crevice like a fire which will bring the whole house down. | James Baldwin | ||
| 3054efb | The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs - as who has not? - of human love, God's love alone is left. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1fecb31 | The writer trapped among a speechless people is in danger of becoming speechless himself. For then he has no mirror, no corroborations of his essential reality; and this means that he has no grasp of the reality of the people around him. | James Baldwin | ||
| 14112cd | Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: American.. | american-history blacks history identity morality race race-relations racism whites | James Baldwin | |
| 28728d8 | She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. It frightened her because she felt that he was reaching for the moon and that he would, therefore, be dashed down against the rocks; but she did no.. | James Baldwin | ||
| e2fc864 | I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life. All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive. | James Baldwin | ||
| 86c0f24 | When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement's second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of "violence" was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England, every single one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England's gl.. | James Baldwin | ||
| c4bff0f | In America, though, life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet. Just | James Baldwin | ||
| 453b98f | But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long. | James Baldwin | ||
| 99e05ab | Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. | contradictions morality race race-relations racism truth | James Baldwin | |
| c92ee80 | it is the responsibility of free men to trust and celebrate what is constant--birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so--and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. | death love | James Baldwin | |
| 943301e | The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. . .the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. . . This world is .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 6690994 | Violent men's grievances are born out of a conviction of their personal righteousness and innocence: they are never the instigators; they are only righting what has been done to them. This shit-eating innocence is crucial to the fantasy of American masculinity, a bizarre collection of expectations and tropes "so paralytically infantile," as James Baldwin writes in "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood," "that it is virtually forbidden--.. | Alice Bolin | ||
| 9747983 | The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5347d8b | For Bigger's tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely.. | James Baldwin | ||
| ebcf07f | 'l n ls`d l yTqwn wl yHtmlwn ! wlknny l 'stTy` 'n 'z`l | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | ||
| 936b2b6 | Wright puts this idea can only proceed from the assumption--not entirely unsound--that Americans, who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experience, have therefore no way of assessing the experience of others and no way of establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2b788ff | Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way that women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women. This is a mystery which can terrify and immobilize a woman, and it is always th.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5cf71f1 | At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. | african-americans blacks race race-relations racism whites | James Baldwin | |
| 3754b14 | How else, then, to explain my every effort to tell in a novel as best I could the stories of slave masters, black and white, and how slavery crushed their souls every morning they got up from their beds and thanked their god for their dominion over others. If I knew the importance of telling that, it was because Baldwin and his kind had planted the idea long ago. (I give him so much credit because he was in the minority of all the black wri.. | James Baldwin | ||
| bee60f7 | They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of those legends, including Christianity, to which the world clings began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted surrender to distortion. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8a40275 | 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 reality. | James Baldwin |