James Baldwin

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

I am not a pessimist. I am a witness.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

People who believe that they are white, and who are not, are a very great danger to us all.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.

The price one pays for refusing to be conscious is to remain a child.

The people who are running this country are insane.

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in everything we do.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

It is a great shock to discover that the world, which one always thought of as an adult world, is not adult at all; it is a world of children, all of whom are playing very complicated games, which they make up as they go along.

Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

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.

People who believe that they are white are not white. They are merely people who are trying to avoid the fact that they are human.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

One writes out of one thing only: one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one has examined one’s experience.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.