Quotes from James Baldwin

Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

It comes as a great shock…to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance…has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty...the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mark of cruelty.

History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.

I can't be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.

Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.

Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

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

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.