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James A. Baldwin Quotes


Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

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

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

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.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

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

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

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.