James A. Baldwin Quotes

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

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

Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.

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

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

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

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

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.