787 Quotes by James Baldwin

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

Swifter far than summer’s flight, Swifter far than youth’s delight, Swifter far than happy night, Art thou come and gone: As the earth when leaves are dead, As the night when sleep is sped, As the heart when joy is fled, I am left alone, alone.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard – the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.