James Baldwin: Everybody's Journey is Individual

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James A. Baldwin

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
James A. Baldwin

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
James A. Baldwin

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
James A. Baldwin

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James A. Baldwin

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
James A. Baldwin

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
James A. Baldwin

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
James A. Baldwin

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
James A. Baldwin

The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
James A. Baldwin

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
James A. Baldwin

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
James A. Baldwin

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James A. Baldwin

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
James A. Baldwin

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
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.
James A. Baldwin

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
James A. Baldwin

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
James A. Baldwin

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.
James A. Baldwin

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James A. Baldwin

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
James A. Baldwin

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
James A. Baldwin

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
James A. Baldwin

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
James A. Baldwin

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
James A. Baldwin

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
James A. Baldwin

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
James A. Baldwin