787 Quotes by James Baldwin

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced... Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self...

I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing!

Great art can only be created out of love.

But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent.

The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.

I really do believe in the New Jerusalem. I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous and people are not yet willing to pay it.

The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated – in the main, abominably – because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.