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"The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it 'ominous' when black people even talk of having rifles? Why don't we have the right to self-defense? Is it because maybe you know we're going to have to defend ourselves against you?"
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"If a moneyed man had a "corny mind, a flatterer would immediately start chasing him like a hungry hen!"

"A government which is not liked by the artists is certainly a bad government, because artist sees very well what is behind the masks!"

"An honest government is the childish dream of the gullible men!"

"Our spiritual history is the history of God-ventriloquists! The truth is that the voice of God is the voice of cunning Man, the ventriloquist's voice!"

"Most of the time it is a good job and a good honour to fight against people's values, because most of the time people's values are irrational and absurd!"

"A country where women are not free has no chance ever to be something good and respectable!"

"Governments stand because people sit; if people stand, governments will sit!"

"It is better to go near the truth and be imprisoned than to stay with the wrong and roam about freely, master Galilei. In fact, getting attached to falsity is terrible slavery, and real freedom is only next to the right."

"For breakfast to be called 'in bed' instead of 'on top of a bed,' the house in which it is about to be eaten has to have at least two rooms (excluding the kitchen); (at least) three, if it has a bathroom."
Explore more quotes by James Baldwin

"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."

"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses."

"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up."

"No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide."

"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 artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains."
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