James Baldwin Quotes
"But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Power, Morality)
"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Beliefs, Impossibility)
"Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Life, Europe, Limits, Possibilities, Sense, Tragedy, Word)
"If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Being)
"It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Age, World)
"It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Man)
"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Music, America, Americans, Limits, Sentimentality, Understanding)
"The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land."
- James Baldwin
(Related: History, American, Land)
"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Experience, Faces, Identity)
"The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Men, Artist, Being, State)
"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Experience, People, Responsibility, Writer)
"The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Beauty, People, Ugly)
"We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Experience, Thought, Beliefs, Deeds)
"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
(Related: Education, Society, Being, Paradox)