01c. 1955 AD...all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me...James Baldwin / quote ↗
02c. 1955 ADA civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.James Baldwin / quote ↗
03c. 1955 ADThe details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.James Baldwin / quote ↗
04c. 1955 ADLove forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.James Baldwin / quote ↗
06c. 1955 ADI know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.James Baldwin / quote ↗
07c. 1955 AD...when the black populations of the world have a future, so will the Western nations have a future-and not till then. But the terrible probability is that the Western populations, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen, and for which generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.James Baldwin / quote ↗
08c. 1955 ADI had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever "here" may be, it must always happen "here" before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves.James Baldwin / quote ↗
09c. 1955 ADFreedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to beJames Baldwin / quote ↗
10c. 1955 ADAnyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox.James Baldwin / quote ↗
11c. 1955 ADThere are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.James Baldwin / quote ↗
12c. 1955 ADAny real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.James Baldwin / quote ↗
13c. 1955 ADTry to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation.James Baldwin / quote ↗
14c. 1955 ADBut it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.James Baldwin / quote ↗
15c. 1955 ADAll art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.James Baldwin / quote ↗
16c. 1955 ADThe artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.James Baldwin / quote ↗
17c. 1955 ADThe purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.James Baldwin / quote ↗
18c. 1955 ADThis is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.James Baldwin / quote ↗
19c. 1955 ADOne of the things, though, that has always afflicted the American reality and the American vision is this aversion to history. History is not something you read about in a book, history is not even the past—it’s the present. Because everybody operates, whether or not we know it, out of assumptions which are produced and produced only by our history. Now the history of this country is not bloodier than other countries, but it’s bloody. It is not more criminal than that of other countries, but it’s criminal. Or in short, it’s not worse than the history of France or England or any country we can name—but it’s different.James Baldwin / quote ↗
20c. 1955 ADYou were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You are not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.James Baldwin / quote ↗
21c. 1955 ADI don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain.James Baldwin / quote ↗
22c. 1955 ADAnd have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white.James Baldwin / quote ↗
23c. 1955 ADThere are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.James Baldwin / quote ↗
24c. 1955 ADThe only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power--and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being.James Baldwin / quote ↗
