I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive. – James Baldwin
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up. – James Baldwin
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. – James Baldwin
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. – James A. Baldwin
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. – James A. Baldwin
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience. – James Baldwin
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in. – James A. Baldwin
You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. – James A. Baldwin
The paradox of education is precisely this; that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. – James Baldwin
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all. – James A. Baldwin
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. – James A. Baldwin
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power. – James Baldwin
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses. – James Baldwin
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours. – James Baldwin
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. – James Baldwin
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone. – James Baldwin
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. – James A. Baldwin
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law. – James A. Baldwin
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead. – James A. Baldwin
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land. – James Baldwin
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. – James A. Baldwin
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever. – James A. Baldwin
The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black. – James Baldwin
Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks. – James A. Baldwin
