James Baldwin Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.”

“If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.”

“It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.”

“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.”

“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.”

“But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.”

“Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.”

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

“It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.”