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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fbc8821 | Is it possible to describe as a culture what may simply be, after all, a history of oppression? That is, is this history and these present facts, which involve so many millions of people who are divided from each other by so many miles of the globe, which operates, and has operated, under such very different conditions, to such different effects, and which has produced so many different subhistories, problems, traditions, possibilities, asp.. | James Baldwin | ||
| fb0f1a8 | Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception. | James Baldwin | ||
| 98a5b07 | Assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism. These relations demanded that the individual, torn from the context to which he owed his identity, should replace his habits of feeling, thinking, and acting by another set of habits which belonged to the strangers who dominated him. | James Baldwin | ||
| 7d69ac2 | I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain. | humanity race race-relations racism white | James Baldwin | |
| f1fd508 | This equation has placed our cities among the most dangerous in the world and has placed our youth among the most empty and most bewildered. The situation of our youth is not mysterious. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models. That is exactly what our children are doing. They are imitating our immorality, our disrespect for the pain of.. | James Baldwin | ||
| bed21f8 | White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as "tokenism". | James Baldwin | ||
| c0e15e2 | Some of the things written during those years, justifying, for example, the execution of the Rosenbergs, or the crucifixion of Alger Hiss (and the beatification of Whittaker Chambers) taught me something about the irresponsibility and cowardice of the liberal community which I will never forget. Their performance, then, yet more than the combination of ignorance and arrogance with which this community has always protected itself against the.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 69f91a6 | The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me. | giovanni-s-room hope james-baldwin last-lines sad symbolism | James Baldwin | |
| 66adc76 | racism is based on fear, that when the white racist confronts the black man, what he sees is not the individual man but a "nightmare" of his own creation" | David A. Leeming | ||
| 5d7915a | Life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 52d1039 | It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse.")" | black-life western-culture western-world | James Baldwin | |
| 4fe8f18 | Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors. | blacks guilt race race-relations racism reflection thought thoughtfulness whites | James Baldwin | |
| f3c45d1 | The projects in Harlem are hated. They are hated almost as much as policemen, and this is saying a great deal. And they are hated for the same reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white world, no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil-rights commissions are set up. | James Baldwin | ||
| 863baf3 | It kept coming back to joy-- how could I live a life filled with it? And always, the answer that came back to me was "Write." ... I am here because of the indigenous people of this country, because of the enslaved people who were here before me, the young people of the civil rights movements who fought hard to get me to this moment. My biggest responsibility is to recognize that I am part of the continuum, that I didn't just appear and star.. | identity writers-on-writing | Glory Edim | |
| 9665d8c | There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard--the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger. | James Baldwin | ||
| 1ed81ef | Love him,' said Jacques, with vehemence, 'love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? | james baldwin | ||
| cff571a | For here you were, Big James, named for me--you were a big baby, I was not--here you were, to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. | black-history love loveless strength world | James Baldwin | |
| e7984f3 | The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare. | forget hero madmen rare remember world | James Baldwin | |
| 422aa7e | Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s--and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them--were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, Sigmund Freud, Paul Goodman, William Styron, C. Wright Mills, Martin Buber, George Orwell, Suzanne Langer, F. R. Leavis, David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Ralph Ellison, Erich Fromm, .. | Philip Roth | ||
| 99c6577 | 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. Their decisions are not really decisions at all-- a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named-- but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not... | James Baldwin | ||
| bb3f22a | James Baldwin lived in this house for more than twenty-five years, and all that was left were half a dozen pink teacups and turquoise saucers buried by the house's rear wall, orange trees that were heavy with fruit, but the fruit was bitter and sharp to the taste. We see Baldwin's name in connection to the present condition more often than we see Faulkner's, Whitman's, or Thoreau's. We can visit houses and places where they lived and imagin.. | Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah | ||
| 8b3ee81 | Uncle Tom is, for example, if he is called uncle, a kind of saint. He is there, he endures, he will forgive us, and this is a key to that image. But if he is not uncle, if he is merely Tom, he is a danger to everybody. He will wreak havoc on the countryside. When he is Uncle Tom he has no sex--when he is Tom, he does--and this obviously says much more about the people who invented this myth than it does about the people who are the object o.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 68efcb4 | You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. | James Baldwin | ||
| 5500bc0 | They are two sides of the same coin and the South will not change--cannot change--until the North changes. The country will not change until it re-examines itself and discovers what it really means by freedom. In the meantime, generations keep being born, bitterness is increased by incompetence, pride, and folly, and the world shrinks around us. It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without dimini.. | James Baldwin | ||
| dedee0c | What I find appalling--and really dangerous--is the American assumption that the Negro is so contented with his lot here that only the cynical agents of a foreign power can rouse him to protest. It is a notion which contains a gratuitous insult, implying, as it does, that Negroes can make no move unless they are manipulated. It forcibly suggests that the Southern attitude toward the Negro is also, essentially, the national attitude. When th.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 640404c | the things that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence. It was this commodity precisely which I had to get rid of at once, literally, on pain of death. I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they .. | James Baldwin | ||
| 58bc682 | No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here -- and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bo.. | race-and-racism-in-america race-relations | James Baldwin | |
| 7f55976 | 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 father and be ultimately dependent on the power and kindness of some other man for the well-being of your house. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8542bd3 | The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interpose between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much), are historical and public attitudes. | culture introjects received-values self-deception society | James Baldwin | |
| 535f37d | Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves. | James Baldwin | ||
| b059c21 | This fatalistic indifference is something that drives the optimistic American liberal quite mad; he is prone, in his more exasperated moments, to refer to Negroes as political children, an appellation not entirely just. Negro liberals, being consulted, assure us that this is something that will disappear with "education," a vast, all-purpose term, conjuring up visions of sunlit housing projects, stacks of copybooks and a race of well-soaped.. | James Baldwin | ||
| a88f344 | No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide. | james-baldwin race race-relations usa | James Baldwin | |
| b114516 | NEGROES IN THE NORTH ARE right when they refer to the South as the Old Country. A Negro born in the North who finds himself in the South is in a position similar to that of the son of the Italian emigrant who finds himself in Italy, near the village where his father first saw the light of day. Both are in countries they have never seen, but which they cannot fail to recognize. The landscape has always been familiar; the speech is archaic, b.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 17083aa | It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John was five years old and in the first grade that he was first noticed; and since he was noticed by an eye altogether alien and impersonal, he began to perceive, in wild uneasiness, his individual existence. | identity identity-confusion identity-crisis individualism race-and-racism-in-america race-relations racism racism-and-culture racism-in-america respect respectability self-actualization self-esteem self-respect | James Baldwin | |
| 2032742 | 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. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats--the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8bad2c5 | Hope is a bad survival strategy. | James Osiris Baldwin | ||
| 67a912b | It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody. | James Baldwin | ||
| c5c8395 | Their faith may be described as childlike, but the end it serves is often sinister. It may, indeed, "keep them happy"--a phrase carrying the inescapable inference that the way of life imposed on Negroes makes them quite actively unhappy--but also, and much more significantly, religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; the bad will b.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 82ce9df | Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever. | James Baldwin | ||
| 55c9b93 | The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn't know, any more than the mind does, why what clings to it clings. | memories memory mind | James Baldwin | |
| bc78537 | The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours. | James Baldwin | ||
| 8b00033 | No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again. And this might be a great relief if I did not also know that, when the knife has fallen, Giovanni, if he feels anything will feel relief. | declaration-of-love giovanni-s-room james-baldwin love never-again one-and-only one-true-love relief sad | James Baldwin | |
| 6eb094f | There was a sense that we were there to get things done very quickly, what James Baldwin had called America's "funny sense of time," as if "with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place." | Suzy Hansen | ||
| dc29001 | No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty.But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt (112) | James Baldwin |