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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.


James A. Baldwin

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JAMES BALDWIN If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory pl...
JAMES BALDWIN And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.
JAMES BALDWIN I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked...
JAMES BALDWIN There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWIN The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does ...
JAMES BALDWIN Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use t...
JAMES BALDWIN The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the fo...
JAMES BALDWIN I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human li...
JAMES BALDWIN Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two unde...
JAMES BALDWIN People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to p...
JAMES BALDWIN Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is ...
JAMES BALDWIN All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that th...
JAMES BALDWIN Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their...
JAMES BALDWIN Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are...
JAMES BALDWIN With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
JAMES BALDWIN Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense...
JAMES BALDWIN Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed onl...
JAMES BALDWIN The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not ...
JAMES BALDWIN People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the...
JAMES BALDWIN Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so muc...
JAMES BALDWIN I must—to be honest—add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by gi...
JAMES BALDWIN Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES BALDWIN Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and th...
JAMES BALDWIN