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"If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not."
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"Stop aspiring and start being. The world needs you!"
"To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present."
"Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from."
"Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it."
"Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth."
"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."
"Your unstoppable nature is becoming and blooming - you simply, are. Go easy."
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin
"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be."
"You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free."
"You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky."
"Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge-revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man."
"White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption-which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards-is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy's assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals."
"I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them."
"There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."
"What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be--not seem--outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined--as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie about one's own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more."
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