James Baldwin Quotes

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.