Quotes from James Baldwin

And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro "first" will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he'll be President of.

A liar always knows he is lying, and that is why liars travel in packs: in order to be reassured that the judgment day will never come for them. They need each other for the well-being, the health, the perpetuation of their lie.

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.

Our humanity is our burden, our life. We need not battle for it. We need only to do what is infinitely more difficult: that is, accept it.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

She was responding to him with parts of herself that had been buried so long she had forgotten they existed. In his office that morning, when he shook her hand, she had suddenly felt a warmth of affection, of nostalgia, of gratitude even—and again in the lobby—he had somehow made her feel safe. It was his friendliness that was so unsettling. She had grown used to unfriendly people.

I'm aware, you know, that I and the people I love may perish in the morning. I know that. But there's light on our faces now.

History does not refer merely to the past, history is literally present in all that we do

Not everything that is face can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

You must pray,' she says, very soberly. I assure you. Even just a little prayer, from time to time. Light a little candle. If it were not for the prayers of the blessed saints, one could not live in this world at all.

You see, whites want black writers to mostly deliver something as if it were an official version of the black experience. But the vocabulary won't hold it, simply. No true account, really, of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. As it is, the only way that you can deal with it is by doing great violence to the assumptions on which the vocabulary is based.

The intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connect me with all the people that were alive, or who had ever been alive.

I do not think you have ever lied to me but I know that you have never told me the truth—why?

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.

They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need.

Giovanni', I said, helplessly, 'be careful. Please be careful'. He gave me an ironical smile. 'Thank you', he said, 'You should have given me that advice the night we met

The world will change, because it has to change.

The white racist has ruled the world for a long time, and the crises we are undergoing now are involved with the fact that the habits of power are not only extremely hard to lose; they are as tenacious as some incurable disease.

If we know, and do nothing, we are worse that the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own - which it is - and render impasssable with our bodies the corridor the the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

All the white people she has ever met needed, in one way or another, to be reassured, consoled, to have their consciences pricked but not blasted; could not, could not afford to hear a truth which would shatter, irrevocably, their image of themselves. It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

Now it is time to create new standards. It is impossible to take seriously a country which will allow a hillbilly to overturn the government of the United States