787 Quotes by James Baldwin

Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.

There is no reason for you try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.

But just as a society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol.

But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded.