Quotes from James Baldwin

In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.

And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden, Jacques said. And then: I wonder why.

Don't let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world's already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.

To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning it it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that moment would have locked me forever in that room with him. And in a way this was exactly what I wanted.

We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.

White people...have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

It was a gesture of great despair and I knew that she was giving herself, not to me, but to that lover who would never come.

It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.

You don't know what's happening on the other side of the wall, because you don't want to know.

You took the best, so why not take the rest?

Money, iit turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of otherthings if you did.

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.

Every white person in this country-and I do not care what he or she says-knows one thing. They may not know, as they put, what I want,but they know they would not like to be black here. If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.

Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.

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

He smiled, Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home. He played with my thumb and grinned. N'est-ce pas ? Beautiful logic, I said. You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there? He laughed. Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.

The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it 'ominous' when black people even talk of having rifles? Why don't we have the right to self-defense? Is it because maybe you know we're going to have to defend ourselves against you?

I remember what it was...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.