“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within," Baldwin wrote in his best-selling 1963 novel The Fire Next Time.

 “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” Baldwin wrote in a 1962 essay for The New York Times.

In his 1963 Talk to Teachers speech he said, “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.”

In The Fire Next Time he wrote, “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”  

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have," Baldwin wrote in his essay No Name in the Street.

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind," he wrote in If Beale Street Could Talk. 

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have," Baldwin wrote in his essay No Name in the Street.

“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all," the novelist told The Village Voice in 1984.

In Notes of a Native Son he wrote, “Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”

He told The Paris Review: “The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”

In The Price of a Ticket, he reflected: “The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."

In 1961 he said, "Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it.”  

In the New York Times he said: “Writers are extremely important people in a country, whether or not the country knows it.” 

He told Life magazine in 1963: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” 

“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven,” Baldwin wrote in his 1962 essay The Creative Process.

“All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are,” Baldwin said in a May 1963 profile in Life Magazine. 

“Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions,” he said in his Talk to Teachers speech.

In The Paris Review he said: “And once you realize that you can do something, it would be difficult to live with yourself if you didn’t do it.”

“Perhaps the turning point in one’s life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one,” Baldwin said in The Paris Review.

Baldwin said in No Name on the Street: “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.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” he said in The New York Times in 1962.

Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son, “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."

“Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor," he said in 1961's Nobody Knows My Name.

Baldwin wrote in Nobody Knows My Name: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.”