These James Baldwin quotes on writing, love, and oppression will open your mind.
James Arthur Baldwin was born onAugust 2, 1924, was an American novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and activist. Being a grandson of a slave, Baldwin had inspired millions with his written words.
His essays which are collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955) cover the intense yet unspoken complexity of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in the mid-20th century of the United States of America. Some of the Baldwin essays are book-length, including The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976), and read in high school and college literature classes.
Baldwin’s work has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Partisan Review, Dissent, the Nation, the New Leader, Reporter, the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and Le Monde.
Born to a young single mother, Baldwin never knew the identity of his biological father. When he was 3, his mother married David Baldwin who was a Baptist minister. He loved reading and was passionate about it at a very young age but before following his passion, he followed his stepfather’s footsteps and served as a youth minister.
When Baldwin was in high school, he got the chance to work in the school’s magazine and published his many poems and short stories. He was going along well with his passion for writing but due to the financial issues when his family struggled with poverty, he had to put his passion aside, hold the plans of college, and start working all sorts of jobs to support his family.
Baldwin met Beauford Delaney who was a famous painter and later become his mentor when he lost all of his hope of becoming a black artist. Beauford Delaney’s influence makes him believe again that a black person could also be an artist.
Being a homosexual in mid-20th century America, Baldwin often faced discrimination and abuse. And already being a victim of racism, Baldwin became an active participant in the civil rights struggle. The assassinations of black activists including Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., pushed him to use a more strong voice in work called No Name in the Street.
James Baldwin died on December 1, 1987, in France due to stomach cancer.
Here we are sharing a collection of James Baldwin quotes on writing, justice, and freedom that are still painfully true to this date.
James Baldwin Quotes
“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.”
― James A. Baldwin
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin
“If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.”
― 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
“The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
“People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”
― 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
“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
James Baldwin Quotes On Writing
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
― James Baldwin
“People can cry much easier than they can change.”
― 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
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“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, The Fire Next Time
“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
“Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
― James Baldwin
“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world… The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
― James Baldwin
“Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.”
― James Baldwin
James Baldwin Quotes On Love
“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
― 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
“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, The Fire Next Time
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
― James Baldwin
“The impossible is the least that one can demand.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”
― 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
“I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.”
― 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
“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin Quotes On Oppression
“I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
“The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”
― James Baldwin
“No man is a devil in his own mind.”
― 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
“The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
“For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”
― 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
“Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it”
― James Baldwin
James Baldwin Quotes On Education
“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 purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
― 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, This Morning, This Evening, So Soon
“When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.”
― James Baldwin
“We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.”
― 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, No Name in the Street
“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
“Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin Quotes On Justice
“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“…love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
“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, Giovanni’s Room
“With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”
― James Baldwin
“I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“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
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
― James Baldwin
James Baldwin Quotes On Freedom
“To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use 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
“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, The Fire Next Time
“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, The Fire Next Time
“Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant,
superbly contemptuous of all that is not
itself, and, as they very definition of passion
implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might
intimidiating power. It contains a challenge.
It contains an unspeakable hope.”
― James Baldwin
“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
― James Baldwin
“It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.”
― 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
“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, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
“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, If Beale Street Could Talk
James Baldwin Quotes On History
“But, when the chips are down, its 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
“All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.”
― James Baldwin
“Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years”
― James Baldwin, Just Above My Head
“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
“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
“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
― 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
“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
― James Baldwin
James Baldwin Quotes On Identity
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin
“It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
― 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, The Fire Next Time
“Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”
― 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
“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
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“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
“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, Giovanni’s Room
“I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin Quotes On Art
“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 breaking of bread.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“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
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
― James Baldwin
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. 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, who had ever been alive.”
― 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
“Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“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, Giovanni’s Room
“People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you’re dead, when they’ve killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn’t have any character. They weep big, bitter tears – not for you. For themselves, because they’ve lost their toy.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country
“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
Did you get inspired by these James Baldwin quotes?
Growing up in poverty and being a victim of racism and abuse, Baldwin chooses to rise despite all the drawbacks in his life. Baldwin’s essays are widely read in high school and college literature classes as part of the curriculum.
Even though he died years before, his powerful words still resonate with today’s society and continue to inspire millions of people. We hope you get inspired with these James Baldwin quotes on love, writing, oppression, and education and will help you to find your way.
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