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


James Baldwin

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES ARTHUR BALDWIN
I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.
NADINE GORDIMER
Things have never been so swell, i have never failed to fail
KURT COBAIN
Now they have a riddle.

- Criminal Minds
DEYTH BANGER
I promised to respect elders opinions but never to obey all their commands blindly except I have giv...
EBENEZER O. AKINRINADE
Don't do it, because you have to do it. Do it, because you love to do it.
PRITISH PATTANAIK
To learn, sometimes you have to feel the fool.
JEFFREY FRY
They have failed. Why antagonize them? But they have failed.
PRAFUL PATEL
Never imitate, but never forget to emulate the best.
DEBASISH MRIDHA
Only children simply accept the fact that their parents have the right to make choices for them. Eve...
THE MIRROR OF MAYBE
Men have never been good, they are not good and they never will be good.
KARL BARTH
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
ERIK H. ERIKSON
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
ERIK ERIKSON
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
ERIK ERIKSON DR.
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
ERIK ERIKSON, DR.
If one keeps on adapting, their contribution will be limited. They
can only imitate but never c...
RAVINDRA SHUKLA
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect fo...
SOCRATES
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they allow disrespect f...
ANON.
Sometimes life gets a little boring so you have to do something crazy to remember your alive!
NEIL OLSSON
Republicans have never been good at public relations.
TAMMY BRUCE
Reasons... questions... what they have in common?

- All get finded in the hard way.
DEYTH BANGER
Good kids are like sunsets. We take them for granted. Every evening they disappear. Most parents nev...
ERMA BOMBECK
I have always weirdly seen myself as more of a character actor. I have never been suave. I could nev...
JAMES MARSDEN
People pay for that they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And th...
DOROTHY ALLISON
Many of the statements made concerning this matter are inaccurate or exaggerated. Clearly, there is ...
DAVID SHERMAN
There was no crime committed. These agents had 15 years experience between them. They have been invo...
JOE LOYA
We should never permit ourselves to do anything that we are not willing to see our children do. We s...
BRIGHAM YOUNG
Even though management is saying the cancer trial was not a focus for them, it is never a good thing...
EDWARD NASH
Some people seem as if they can never have been children, and others seem as if they could never be ...
GEORGE DENNISON PRENTICE
I've been a loner all the time throughout my life... I haven't been the best father... Many ...
B. B. KING
There has been enough suffering in our country, there has been enough of children whose dreams die b...
JOHN AGYEKUM KUFUOR
Good children do taste better, but there are so few of them. If you can be satisfied with naughty ch...
DAVID DEMCHUK
You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
HONORE DE BALZAC
The CEOs who do this are people who have never failed at anything.
TED KENNEDY
Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all
HEINRICH HEINE
I realize then that we never have children, we receive them. And sometimes it’s not for quite as l...
JODI PICOULT
If you have donated, these children may never know your name, but they will never forget your kindne...
ROMA DOWNEY
Believe. Have faith. Don't stand in your own way. If you don't believe in yourself, a positive outco...
AKIROQ BROST
You are the most unlucky man on the earth if you have been never failed.
LALIT BHOJWANI
Listening to someone talk isn't at all like listening to their words played over on a machine. What ...
ORIANA FALLACI
You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are...
AMIRI BARAKA
Disney World has acquired by now something of the air of a national shrine. American parents who don...
SIMON HOGGART
I was told by my mom when I was very young not to drink and to make good decisions so for those who ...
ANDRE WILLIAMS
They would have been very let down if they had to leave the theater and he had missed. He would feel...
JAMES RANDI
Children imitate their parents, employees their managers.
AMIT KALANTRI
Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Queens perhaps perform better in the role of monarch because they never take their position for gran...
KATE WILLIAMS
My children have never watched any of my films. Charlie knows that daddy makes movies, but he says t...
RUSSELL CROWE
I didn't have children, but I never wanted children.
IRIS APFEL
I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, w...
FRAN LEBOWITZ
You can't deal with being odd?
...

Become like them...

Become drug delear...
DEYTH BANGER
These are the children who are at greatest risk. Until now, they hadn't been taken into account beca...
ELISEO SANDOVAL
We have been very blessed with the people who have vacationed here and ... are so attached to the st...
BUZ PLYLER
We have been very blessed with the people who have vacationed here and . . . are so attached to the ...
BUZ PLYLER
I've never been crazy. I'm a very good girl, to be honest. I don't do anything to hurt a...
LEIGHTON MEESTER
When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will hav...
E. W. HOWE
When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will hav...
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They...
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.
MARILYN MONROE
I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.
SARAH WATERS
Often they have to return to their other children, whom they've left in the bush. Sometimes they com...
DR. KHADIJA ABDALLA
I've been very fortunate and have never had any real problems with people. But I've also had the gut...
SEAN CONNERY
Yes, I am physical but never go looking for fights. I have been in my share of them but never looked...
DAVE BAUTISTA
They haven't said it, but let's be clear: I would never have been on the list for James Bond...
TOM HOLLANDER
About sacrifice and the offering of sacrifices, sacrificial animals think quite differently from tho...
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Not everyone has the time to be normal.
LJUPKA CVETANOVA
You have enough time to do everything God wants you to do.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
I hadn't said goodbye. It had been easier, like always, to just disappear, sparing myself the messy ...
SARAH DESSEN
Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they coul...
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, eve...
EDMUND BURKE
I don't seem to have ever had a plan, but I have always been quite good at walking through doors...
JULIAN FELLOWES
I've been very impressed with our effort and our attitudes. I never have to ask them to do the littl...
ROBYN ANDERSON
Be wary of someone who has never failed, or seem to have no faults... Too good to be true usually is...
HENRY CLOUD
Never have children, only grand children.
GORE VIDAL
These supervisors have been running unopposed, and they (feel) they can do anything they want. They'...
CLAUDIA LITTLE
Granny," said Esk, in the exasperated and remarkably adult voice children use to berate their waywar...
TERRY PRATCHETT
When children feel they have to earn our love by what they accomplish, they never feel good about th...
, JOINT CUSTODY WITH A JERK: RAISING A CHILD WITH AN UNCOOPERATIVE EX, 2011
I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonde...
FRAN LEBOWITZ
They looked good. It's good to have depth at the quarterback position because you never know what co...
MICHAEL THOMAS
When Lorenz plays well, their team is difficult to beat. They have very good players around Lorenz, ...
AARON JOHNSTON
Our beloved, endangered brown pelicans have a never-ending struggle to survive. Pelicans have been m...
KAREN BENZEL
I've done some bits of shockingly bad TV that have never been shown, or at least I hope they'...
ELLIOT COWAN
I've never been fired in my life. From anything. I've never failed at anything I've trie...
TOM FRESTON
I miss singing very, very much, but the best thing is I have never been busier.
JULIE ANDREWS
It is the duty of children to wait on elders, and not the elders on children
AFRICAN PROVERB
I always admired virtue - but I could never imitate it.
CHARLES II
I always admired virtue - but I could never imitate it
CHARLES II
Brides have told me this was completely something they never would have expected from their boyfrien...
MARILYN OLIVEIRA
But if any widow have children or nephews, let them learn first to shew piety at home, and to requi...
BIBLE
If our children are becoming teenagers who are abusive, have mental health issues, and are committin...
VIKRAM PATEL
I've never met their mother, but there is something good that is evident that she passed on. They ar...
KARLA WHETZEL
Three of our five have never been here before, but their teammates have all rallied around them. It ...
STEPHANIE DUNN
And modern houses don't have passages, either, for children to play and run about in, and for dogs, ...
MARGUERITE DURAS
A lot of children find symbolic arithmetic quite difficult and tedious, yet the children loved our t...
ELIZABETH SPELKE
I like to watch people. For example, people at the airport... What is interesting about them is that...
KAREN BLACK
Now I do. I never really listened to them (before). Just seeing their merchandise and listening to t...
CARMELO ANTHONY
You can never value freedom until you have been imprisoned,you can never value shoes until you have ...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able t...
CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON

More James Baldwin

If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.
JAMES BALDWIN
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and t...
JAMES BALDWIN
The future is like heaven. Everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
JAMES BALDWIN
The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
JAMES BALDWIN
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. -James...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the i...
JAMES BALDWIN
Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered ...
JAMES BALDWIN
People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more...
JAMES BALDWIN
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and th...
JAMES BALDWIN
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy...
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN
The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself...
JAMES BALDWIN
The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea...
JAMES BALDWIN
The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the poin...
JAMES BALDWIN
If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described...
JAMES BALDWIN
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that ...
JAMES BALDWIN
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast...
JAMES BALDWIN
When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I ...
JAMES BALDWIN
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the m...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
JAMES BALDWIN
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without mo...
JAMES BALDWIN
Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people ...
JAMES BALDWIN
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on ...
JAMES BALDWIN
We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we ...
JAMES BALDWIN
We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man...
JAMES BALDWIN
Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in...
JAMES BALDWIN
The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to e...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the inde...
JAMES BALDWIN
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES BALDWIN
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on...
JAMES BALDWIN
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other his...
JAMES BALDWIN
An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wre...
JAMES BALDWIN
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience...
JAMES BALDWIN
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world...
JAMES BALDWIN
The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the pa...
JAMES BALDWIN
Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours.
JAMES BALDWIN
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting...
JAMES BALDWIN
The future is... black.
JAMES BALDWIN
Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom...
JAMES BALDWIN
Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. Peop...
JAMES BALDWIN
James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no on...
JAMES BALDWIN
If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze...
JAMES BALDWIN
There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own e...
JAMES BALDWIN
Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.
JAMES BALDWIN
Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.
JAMES BALDWIN
Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is...
JAMES BALDWIN
When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
JAMES BALDWIN
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, ...
JAMES BALDWIN
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, fo...
JAMES BALDWIN
Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion...
JAMES BALDWIN
There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one ou...
JAMES BALDWIN
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imita...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themsel...
JAMES BALDWIN
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a s...
JAMES BALDWIN
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES BALDWIN
People can cry much easier than they can change.
JAMES BALDWIN
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly si...
JAMES BALDWIN
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibilit...
JAMES BALDWIN
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
JAMES BALDWIN
Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and stre...
JAMES BALDWIN
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocu...
JAMES BALDWIN
Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits.
JAMES BALDWIN
He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
JAMES BALDWIN
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immut...
JAMES BALDWIN
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN
For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their abili...
JAMES BALDWIN
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on th...
JAMES BALDWIN
Anyone who had ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Whose little boy are you?
JAMES BALDWIN
There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for the...
JAMES BALDWIN
There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are...
JAMES BALDWIN
To accept one's past -- one's history -- is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how...
JAMES BALDWIN
Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's...
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN
If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are descr...
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be reall...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the arti...
JAMES BALDWIN
Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also peopl...
JAMES BALDWIN
A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.
JAMES BALDWIN
We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; a...
JAMES BALDWIN
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
JAMES BALDWIN
We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink.
JAMES BALDWIN
Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.
JAMES BALDWIN
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where...
JAMES BALDWIN
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to thier hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once h...
JAMES BALDWIN
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
JAMES BALDWIN
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forc...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the In...
JAMES BALDWIN
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense...
JAMES BALDWIN
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossib...
JAMES BALDWIN
The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the dis...
JAMES BALDWIN
The first time I saw Reverend Shuttlesworth, for example, he came strolling across the parking lot o...
JAMES BALDWIN
To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior ar...
JAMES BALDWIN
The distance between us, and I had never thought of this before, was that they did not know this, an...
JAMES BALDWIN
Afro-Americans. Which is but a wedding, however, of two confusions, an arbitrary linking of two unde...
JAMES BALDWIN
People, even if they are so thoughtless as to be born black, do not come into this world merely to p...
JAMES BALDWIN
I remembered his older brother, who had died in Sicily, in battle for the free world- he had barely ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is ...
JAMES BALDWIN
All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that th...
JAMES BALDWIN
It must be remembered that in those great days I was considered to be an "integrationist" - this was...
JAMES BALDWIN
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves ...
JAMES BALDWIN
I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fi...
JAMES BALDWIN
I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.
JAMES BALDWIN
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their...
JAMES BALDWIN
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever di...
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current a...
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are...
JAMES BALDWIN
People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than th...
JAMES BALDWIN
With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
JAMES BALDWIN
I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.
JAMES BALDWIN
Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed onl...
JAMES BALDWIN
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not re...
JAMES BALDWIN
People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to...
JAMES BALDWIN
[I am] someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simpl...
JAMES BALDWIN
Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are...
JAMES BALDWIN
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWIN
Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young...
JAMES BALDWIN
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the indepen...
JAMES BALDWIN
If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.
JAMES BALDWIN
The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.
JAMES BALDWIN
It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, b...
JAMES BALDWIN
Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it
JAMES BALDWIN
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impass...
JAMES BALDWIN
In my experience - and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don't really know what the word...
JAMES BALDWIN
But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the s...
JAMES BALDWIN
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be JAMES BALDWIN The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to ex...
JAMES BALDWIN
If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory pl...
JAMES BALDWIN
And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.
JAMES BALDWIN
The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization...
JAMES BALDWIN
Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents,...
JAMES BALDWIN
I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked...
JAMES BALDWIN
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, f...
JAMES BALDWIN
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that ga...
JAMES BALDWIN
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES BALDWIN
It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do bo...
JAMES BALDWIN
It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really...
JAMES BALDWIN
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, fo...
JAMES BALDWIN
She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it's because she's felt since we were children that our Da...
JAMES BALDWIN
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I w...
JAMES BALDWIN
I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we di...
JAMES BALDWIN
Some moments in a life, and they needn't be very long or seem very important, can make up for so muc...
JAMES BALDWIN
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the fo...
JAMES BALDWIN
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connect...
JAMES BALDWIN
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more...
JAMES BALDWIN
There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for the...
JAMES BALDWIN
It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death-- ought to decide, indeed, to earn one...
JAMES BALDWIN
The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, ...
JAMES BALDWIN
In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be for...
JAMES BALDWIN
Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
JAMES BALDWIN
It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even ...
JAMES BALDWIN
I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human li...
JAMES BALDWIN
No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another....
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty o...
JAMES BALDWIN
I have met only a very few people - and most of these were not Americans - who had any real desire t...
JAMES BALDWIN
To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past ca...
JAMES BALDWIN
There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWIN
When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now...
JAMES BALDWIN
All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by dro...
JAMES BALDWIN
You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for...
JAMES BALDWIN
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which...
JAMES BALDWIN
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
JAMES BALDWIN
how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live...
JAMES BALDWIN
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immu...
JAMES BALDWIN
Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
JAMES BALDWIN
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does ...
JAMES BALDWIN
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use t...
JAMES BALDWIN
But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began sear...
JAMES BALDWIN
People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me fo...
JAMES BALDWIN
I must—to be honest—add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by gi...
JAMES BALDWIN
The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or sh...
JAMES BALDWIN
You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look a...
JAMES BALDWIN
I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES BALDWIN
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the...
JAMES BALDWIN
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
JAMES BALDWIN
Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWIN
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The ...
JAMES BALDWIN
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you ...
JAMES BALDWIN
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES A. BALDWIN