James Baldwin.

In the Case of the American Negro, from the Moment You Are Born, Every Stick and Stone, Every Face Is White. Since You Have Not yet Seen a Mirror, You Suppose You Are Too. It Comes as a Great Shock Around the Age of 5, 6 or 7 to Discover That the Flag to Which You Have Pledged Allegiance, Along with Everybody Else, Has Not Pledged Allegiance to You. It Comes as a Great Shock to See Gary Cooper Killing off the Indians, and Although You Are Rooting for Gary Cooper, That the Indians Are You.

Confusion Is a Luxury Which Only the Very, Very Young Can Possibly Afford.

Nobody Is More Dangerous Than He Who Imagines Himself Pure in Heart; for His Purity, by Definition, Is Unassailable.

Much Has Been Written of Love Turning to Hatred, of the Heart Growing Cold with the Death of Love. It Is a Remarkable Process. It Is Far More Terrible Than Anything I Have Ever Read About It, More Terrible Than Anything I Will Ever Be Able to Say.

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.

Art Would Not Be Important If Life Were Not Important, and Life Is Important.

People Are Trapped in History and History Is Trapped in Them.

Money, It Turned Out, Was Exactly Like Sex. You Thought of Nothing Else If You Didn’t Have It and Thought of Other Things If You Did.

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.

It Is True That Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right, as We Love to Point Out to the People We Have Wronged. but One Wrong Doesn’t Make a Right, Either. People Who Have Been Wronged Will Attempt to Right the Wrong; They Would Not Be People If They Didn’t. They Can Rarely Afford to Be Scrupulous About the Means They Will Use. They Will Use Such Means as Come to Hand. Neither, in the Main, Will They Distinguish One Oppressor from Another, nor See Through to the Root Principle of Their Oppression.

Despair Is a Sin. I Believe That. It Is Easy to Be Bleak About the Human Race, but There Are People Who Have Proved to Me That We Can Be Better Than We Are.

You’ve Got to Tell the World How to Treat You. If the World Tells You How You Are Going to Be Treated, You Are in Trouble.

Not Everything That Is Faced Can Be Changed; but Nothing Can Be Changed Until It Is Faced.

The Betrayal of a Belief Is Not the Same Thing as Ceasing to Believe. If This Were Not so There Would Be No Moral Standards in the World at All.

If the Concept of God Has Any Validity or Any Use, It Can Only Be to Make Us Larger, Freer, and More Loving. If God Cannot Do This, Then It Is Time We Got Rid of Him.

Without Love, Pleasure Withers Quickly, Becomes a Foul Taste on the Palate, and Pleasure’s Inventions Are Soon Exhausted. There Must Be a Soul Within the Body You Are Holding, a Soul Which You Are Striving to Meet, a Soul Which Is Striving to Meet Yours.

If the Word Integration Means Anything, This Is What It Means: That We, with Love, Shall Force Our Brothers to See Themselves as They Are, to Cease Fleeing from Reality and Begin to Change It.

I Conceive of God, in Fact, as a Means of Liberation and Not a Means to Control Others.

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.

Perhaps I Did Not Succumb to Ideology … Because I Have Never Seen Myself as a Spokesman. I Am a Witness. in the Church in Which I Was Raised You Were Supposed to Bear Witness to the Truth. Now, Later On, You Wonder What in the World the Truth Is, but You Do Know What a Lie Is.

Nobody Can Stay in the Garden of Eden. I Wonder Why.

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. This Is Irreducible. and It’s True of Everybody. Now, It Is True That the Nature of Society Is to Create, Among Its Citizens, an Illusion of Safety; but It Is Also Absolutely True That the Safety Is Always Necessarily an Illusion. Artists Are Here to Disturb the Peace.

People Can’t, Unhappily, Invent Their Mooring Posts, Their Lovers and Their Friends, Anymore Than They Can Invent Their Parents. Life Gives These and Also Takes Them Away and the Great Difficulty Is to Say Yes to Life.

We Have yet to Understand That If I Am Starving, You Are in Danger. If People Think That My Danger Makes Them Safe, We Are in Trouble.