Quotes by James Baldwin

About James Baldwin:

James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions. Some Baldwin essays are book-length, for instance The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

James Baldwin

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.

James Baldwin

Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a s...

James Baldwin

I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, to...

James Baldwin

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.

James Baldwin

It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.

James Baldwin

No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge s...

James Baldwin

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

James Baldwin

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

James Baldwin

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

James Baldwin

Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true - anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other - beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined,...

James Baldwin

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

James Baldwin

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the pe...

James Baldwin

White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as "tokenism". For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of...

James Baldwin

What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be--not seem--outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined--as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed ...

James Baldwin

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

James Baldwin

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

James Baldwin

Author Bio

  • NameJames Baldwin
  • Description(1924-1987) writer from the United States
  • BornAugust 2, 1924
  • DiedDecember 1, 1987
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Novelist; Playwright; Civil Rights Defender; Essayist; Social Critic
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; George Polk Award