James Baldwin Quotes

Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.

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

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

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

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

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.