James Baldwin quotes

Born
August 2, 1924 New York City, New York, U.S.

Died
December 1, 1987.

Occupation
Writer.

James Baldwin was an American novelist and social critic. 

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
– James Baldwin

Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
– James Baldwin

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
– James Baldwin

Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
– James Baldwin

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
– James Baldwin

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
– James Baldwin

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
– James Baldwin

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.
– James Baldwin

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
– James Baldwin

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
– James Baldwin

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
– James Baldwin

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
– James Baldwin

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
– James Baldwin

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
– James Baldwin

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

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
– James Baldwin

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
– James Baldwin

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
– James Baldwin

People can cry much easier than they can change.
– James Baldwin

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.
– James Baldwin

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
– James Baldwin

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
– James Baldwin

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
– James Baldwin

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
– James Baldwin

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
– James Baldwin

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
– James Baldwin

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
– James Baldwin