James Arthur Baldwin was one of the 20th century’s greatest writers and activist. He broke new literary ground with the exploration of racial and social issues in his many works. Baldwin was especially known for his essays on the black experience in America. Famous James Baldwin quotes will bring you closer to humanity, feed your soul and inspire you to change the world.
If you’re searching for quotes by prominent activists that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of inspirational Malcolm X quotes, Virginia Woolf quotes, and Sojourner Truth quotes.
Top James Baldwin Quotes on Identity, Freedom and Education
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. – James Baldwin
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. – James Baldwin
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. – James Baldwin
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. – James Baldwin
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. – James Baldwin
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. – James Baldwin
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
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. – James Baldwin
Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. – James Baldwin
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. – James Baldwin
People can cry much easier than they can change. – James Baldwin
I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do. – James Baldwin
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. – James Baldwin
The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. – James Baldwin
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. – 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
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose. – James Baldwin
True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers, and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life – James Baldwin
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. – James Baldwin
Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality. – James Baldwin
You write in order to change the world … if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it. – 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
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. – James Baldwin
The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat. – James Baldwin
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back. – James Baldwin
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. – James Baldwin
Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it. – James Baldwin
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind. – James Baldwin
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. – James Baldwin
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know. – James Baldwin
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. – James Baldwin
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being. – James Baldwin
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. – James Baldwin
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains. – James Baldwin
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore – James Baldwin
You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all. – James Baldwin
No man is a devil in his own mind. – James Baldwin
Hatred is always self-hatred, and there is something suicidal about it. – James Baldwin
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. – James Baldwin
Whoever debases others is debasing himself. – James Baldwin
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 Baldwin
If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real, they’re real for you whether they’re real or not. – James Baldwin
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law. – James Baldwin
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side. – James Baldwin
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. – James Baldwin
People who believe that they are strong-willed, and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. – James Baldwin
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. – James Baldwin
If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came, I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody. – James Baldwin
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. – James Baldwin
Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it – James Baldwin
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. – James Baldwin
There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior. – James Baldwin
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. – James Baldwin
Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black. – James Baldwin
I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world. – James Baldwin
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. – James Baldwin
History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about. – James Baldwin
Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it. – James Baldwin
But, when the chips are down, it’s better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love. – James Baldwin
How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should? – James Baldwin
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? – James Baldwin
When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. – James Baldwin
The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it. – James Baldwin
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror. – James Baldwin
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers. – James Baldwin
The impossible is the least that one can demand. – James Baldwin
Your crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on your head – James Baldwin
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. – James Baldwin
For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. – James Baldwin
Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires. – James Baldwin
Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves. – James Baldwin
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all. – James Baldwin
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent. – James Baldwin
The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible. – James Baldwin
If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are. – James Baldwin
There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation. – 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
Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal. – James Baldwin
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become. – James Baldwin
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in. – James Baldwin
Artists are here to disturb the peace. – James Baldwin
People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted. – James Baldwin
With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes. – James Baldwin
I want to be an honest man and a good writer. – James Baldwin
We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. – James Baldwin
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. – James Baldwin
To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. – James Baldwin
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. – James Baldwin
There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people. – James Baldwin
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions. – James Baldwin
Whose little boy are you? – James Baldwin
We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible. – James Baldwin
There are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive. – James Baldwin
Americans should never come to Europe,’ she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, ‘it means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had. – James Baldwin
You took the best, so why not take the rest? – James Baldwin
Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person – ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. – James Baldwin
You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you. – James Baldwin
The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black. – James Baldwin
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction. – James Baldwin
You cannot fix what you will not face. – James Baldwin
If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected – those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! – and listens to their testimony. – James Baldwin
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out. – James Baldwin
To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage. – James Baldwin
A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless. – 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
We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it. – 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 is growing up. – James Baldwin
People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say ‘Yes’ to life. – James Baldwin
A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do. – James Baldwin
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. – James Baldwin
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? – James Baldwin
The purpose of education is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions. – James Baldwin
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. – James Baldwin
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. – James Baldwin
