787 Quotes by James Baldwin

Color is not a human or a personal reality it is a political reality.

The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow!

The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.

There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun.

The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.

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.