Quotes by Baldwin, James

"The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed."

Baldwin, James on students   

"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."

Baldwin, James on belief
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"We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours."

Baldwin, James on belief
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"When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself."

Baldwin, James on books - reading
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"Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock."

Baldwin, James on change
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"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

Baldwin, James on change
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"People can cry much easier than they can change."

Baldwin, James on change
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"There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it."

Baldwin, James on children   

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

Baldwin, James on children
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"The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

Baldwin, James on work   

"A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it."

Baldwin, James on truth   

"We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed."

Baldwin, James on truth   

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

Baldwin, James on vocation   

"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."

Baldwin, James on writers and writing
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"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent."

Baldwin, James on writers and writing
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"Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels."

Baldwin, James on christians and christianity   

"The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible."

Baldwin, James on conformity   

"Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have."

Baldwin, James on death