787 Quotes by James Baldwin

But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

In the culture to be born there will no doubt be old and new elements. How these elements will be mixed is not a question to which any individual can respond. The response must be given by the community. But we can say this: that the response will be given, and not verbally, but in tangible facts, and by action.

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.

Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.

The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.