James Baldwin Quotes

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

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.

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

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

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.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities.

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.

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

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

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

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.

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