top of page
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Ethics quotes

"It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit."

"If you are a sparrow, don't attack the eagle; be wise! If you are an eagle, don't attack the sparrow; be just!"

"It is better to be slave to righteousness than slave to sin."

"To live consciously and courageously, to resonate with kindness and respect, to awaken the true spirit within others and to leave this world better than it was when i found it."
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin

"It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself."

"I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea, time flowed past indifferently above us, hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning our life held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and fear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride."

"The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly."

"Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being."

"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."

"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."

"Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist."
bottom of page