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"In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty-necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. This particular true faith, moreover, is more deeply concerned about the soul than it is about the body, to which fact the flesh (and the corpses) of countless infidels bears witness."
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Exlpore more Ethics quotes
"It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit."
"It's okay to be honest about not knowing rather than spreading falsehood. While it is often said that honesty is the best policy, silence is the second best policy."
"The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble."
"When truth and honesty is absent in the nation, it relates not just to the politicians."
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin
"The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black."
"If I could make you stay, I would,' he shouted. 'If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you-if I could make you stay, I would.' He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his finger at me, grotesquely playful. 'One day, perhaps, you will wish I had."
"I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities."
"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be."
"The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare."
"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."
"I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter."
"Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges."
"Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being."
"We had our arms round each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find."
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