top of page
.png){kind=small}
"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more History quotes
"There was something melancholic about that symbol of their nation's promise of freedom, a bell with a chipped mouth and cleft body."
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
"Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself."
"There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said."
"More than half of our history is lost, not because they were not documented, but they had no guardians and protectors."
"And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again."
Explore more quotes by James A. Baldwin
"The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever."
"Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time."
"It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."
"The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions."
"Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did."
"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."
"There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now."
"There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention."
"Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it."
bottom of page