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"We live in a nation of pigs and murderers."
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"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."

"William Cowper said that God made the country, and man made the town. If it was the opposite, there would be no country; because town can be created from the country but the country cannot be created from the town!"

"Bureaucracy is a huge beast; deeply rooted, it exists even among artists; it's an almost losing battle against it."

"Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him."

"Saying someone is religious is heard in most of America as a compliment, a reassuring affirmation that someone will be moral, ethical, and after a few glasses of wine, a freak in the bedroom."

"More than anything else, we need in this society the opportunity for people to tell us what they think without being told that they're either dumb, or stupid, or uninformed."

"Shyness is a luxury reserved for those who are above the poverty line. To a beggar, being shy is deadly."

"When a man's girlfriend's parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they're not really concerned about him, they're concerned about their daughter's tummy."

"The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under."
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin

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

"I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine."

"The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic-a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall."

"The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people, it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."
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