Quotes from James Baldwin

Nothing is more unbearable, once has it, than freedom.

A man is not a man until he's able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.

But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded.

one day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.

I have been carried into precinct basements often enough, and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.

People make you pay for the way you look, which is also the way you think you look, and what time writes is a record of that collision.

but the Atlantic Ocean is deep and wide and money doesn't hurry from the other side.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.

Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist.

I don't believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn't care.

but no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.

But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reëxamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.

The sons of the masters were roaming the world, looking for arms to hold them. And the arms that might have held them--could not forgive.

If we understood ourselves better we would damage ourselves less.

He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

It is your responsibility to change the society if you think yourself as an educated person

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.

The real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road—and the road has a trick of being the most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright—and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.

To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and if I can respect this, both of us can live. Neither of us, truly, can live without the other: a statement which would not sound so banal if one were not so endlessly compelled to repeat it, and act on that belief.

No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide.

When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says give me liberty, or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad n*****, so there won't be any more like him.

We had our arms round each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.

Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.

In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection.