James Baldwin Quotes

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn’t a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.

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

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

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

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

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

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

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.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.