One cannot argue with anyone’s experience or decision or belief. All my evidence would be thrown out of court as irrelevant to the main body of the case, for I could cite only exceptions. The South Side proved the justice of the indictment; the state of the world proved the justice of the indictment. Everything else, stretching back throughout recorded time, was merely a history of those exceptions who had tried to change the world and had failed.

— James Baldwin

James Baldwin Quotes

Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don’t be afraid.

— James Baldwin

Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together – whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.

— James Baldwin

The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

— James Baldwin

It is very frightening to belong to somebody.

— James Baldwin

This has everything to do, of course, with the nature of that dream and with the fact that we Americans, of whatever color, do not dare examine it and are far from having made it a reality.

— James Baldwin

I sometimes think, with despair, that Americans will swallow whole any political speech whatever – we’ve been doing very little else, these last, bad years.

— James Baldwin

But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.

— James Baldwin

Look, men have been sleeping with men for thousands of years – and raising tribes. This is a Western sickness, it really is. It’s an artificial division. Men will be sleeping with each other when the trumpet sounds. It’s only this infantile culture which has made such a big deal of it.

— James Baldwin

For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.

— James Baldwin

It is one thing to overthrow a dictator or to repel and invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution.

— James Baldwin

That’s what the Blues and Spirituals are all about. It is the ability to look on things as they are and survive your losses, or even not survive them – to know that your losses are coming. To know they are coming is the only possible insurance you have, a faint insurance, that you will survive them.

— James Baldwin

Fonny liked me so much that it didn’t occur to him that he loved me. I liked him so much that no other boy was real to me. I didn’t see them. I didn’t know what this meant. But the waiting moment, which had spied us on the road, and which was waiting for us, knew.

— James Baldwin

I said before that America’s effort to avoid the presence of black people constricts American literature. It creates a trap white writers find themselves in.

— James Baldwin

I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.

— James Baldwin

Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception. It is up to the American writer to find out what these laws and assumptions are. In a society much given to smashing taboos without thereby managing to be liberated from them, it will be no easy matter.

— James Baldwin

Men are men, and sometimes they must be left alone.

— James Baldwin

And in Uncle Tom’s Cabin we may find foreshadowing of both: the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power.

— James Baldwin

I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are so lost.

— James Baldwin

Me, I want to escape,′ he had told me, ‘Je veux m’evader – this dirty world, this dirty body. I never wish to make love again with anything more than the body.

— James Baldwin

One cannot argue with anyone’s experience or decision or belief. All my evidence would be thrown out of court as irrelevant to the main body of the case, for I could cite only exceptions. The South Side proved the justice of the indictment; the state of the world proved the justice of the indictment. Everything else, stretching back throughout recorded time, was merely a history of those exceptions who had tried to change the world and had failed.

— James Baldwin
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