Quotes from James Baldwin

It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all Americans distrust politicians. (No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what effect this mutual contempt has on either the public or the politicians, who have, indeed, very little to do with one another.)

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live, and have lived here, are so ugly that now they cannot even speak to one another. It does not demand much reflection to be appalled at the inevitable state of mind achieved by people who dare not speak freely about those things which most disturb them.

The American soil is full of corpses of my ancestors– through 400 years and at least three wars. Why is my freedom, my citizenship, in question now?

I don't know any writers who don't drink.

It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.

The writer trapped among a speechless people is in danger of becoming speechless himself. For then he has no mirror, no corroborations of his essential reality; and this means that he has no grasp of the reality of the people around him.

It is said that [Shakespeare's] time was easier than ours, but I doubt it—no time can be easy if one is living through it.

The conquests of England - every single one of them bloody - are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England's glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous when it comes to Blacks. And the only way to defeat Malcom's point is to concede and then ask oneself why this is so.

It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about about anything which one hasn't, by an act of the imagination, made one's own.

quoted Djuna Barnes: "Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.

The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could not endure it.

I think she's a beautiful woman. She may not be beautiful to look at whatever the fuck that means, in this kingdom of the blind.

The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.

One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.

For he was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.

She sensed that what her aunt spoke of as love was something else—a bribe, a threat, an indecent will to power. She knew that the kind of imprisonment that love might impose was also, mysteriously, a freedom for the soul and spirit, was water in the dry place, and had nothing to do with the prisons, churches, laws, rewards, and punishments, that so positively cluttered the landscape of her aunt's mind.

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.

But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way that women do. It is very much harder, and it takes longer for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women.

They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of those legends, including Christianity, to which the world clings began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted surrender to distortion.

Since Negroes have been in this country their one major, devastating gain was their Emancipation, an emancipation no one regards any more as having been dictated by humanitarian impulses.

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

And if one despairs—as who has not?—of human love, God's love alone is left. But God—and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that tremendous floor, unwillingly—is white. And if His love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far?

Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all. That's the only advice you can give anybody. And it's not advice, it's an observation.

But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was delighted to see it. There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun.