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"The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black."
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"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
"Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
"The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not."
"He makes people pleased with him by making them first pleased with themselves."
"People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy."
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin
"The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic-a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall."
"Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins."
"Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead."
"The necessity, then, of those "lesser breeds without the law-those wogs, barbarians, niggers-is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply "spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again, leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest."
"If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go."
"He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear."
"Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx."
"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."
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