James Baldwin

The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.

Children, especially, are very good at knowing what's going on, and they will not forgive you for lying to them.

If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

The people who hurt you are not better than you. They are just luckier.

The only way to police a moral universe is to make it happen.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people he's writing about.

The whole language of love, in this country, is terribly debased.

You can't be free until I'm free.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.

Everybody's got to love somebody. And if you can't love the one you want, you love the one you got.

The price of the ticket is to be human.

It is a terrible thing to see a person without a country.

To be sensual is to be awake and present to the world.

The great difficulty is that the American people are not, and do not want to be, aware of the nature of the crisis.

You can't live in this country and be a black man and not be angry.

The world is full of people who have never had to look at themselves.

The sexual question and the racial question have always been intertwined.

It is not the ghetto that is the problem, it is the mind of the ghetto.

The root of the matter is that the white man has projected onto the Negro that which he despises, fears, and wishes to avoid in himself.