James Baldwin Quotes

Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

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.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

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

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

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

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.