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- Dave on The Odyssey [Ὀδύσσεια], Book 6, l. 180ff [Odysseus to Nausicaa] (c. 700 BC) [tr. Rieu (1946)]
- Richard McBroom on “What I Believe,” Forum and Century (Oct 1930)
- Marcus Aurelius - (Spurious) | WIST on Meditations, Book 2, #11 [tr. Gill (2014)]
- Richard McBroom on “What I Believe,” Forum and Century (Oct 1930)
- Elizabeth II - Address to the Nation (5 Apr 2020) | WIST on “We’ll Meet Again” (1939) [with Hughie Charles]
- Pratchett, Terry - The Last Hero (2001) | WIST on Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs, #3366 (1732)
- King, Stephen - On Writing, ch. 12 (2000) | WIST on In “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction,” The Guardian (20 Feb 2010)
- King, Stephen - On Writing, ch. 12 (2000) | WIST on On the Art of Writing, Lecture 12 “On Style,” Cambridge University (28 Jan 1914)
- Richard McBroom on “What I Believe,” Forum and Century (Oct 1930)
- Phillips, Wendell - "Mobs and Education," Speech, Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, Boston (16 Dec 1860) | WIST on “The Boston Mob,” speech, Antislavery Meeting, Boston (21 Oct 1855)
Quotations by Baldwin, James
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) American novelist, playwright, activist
“An interview with James Baldwin” by Studs Terkel (1961), in Conversations With James Baldwin (1989)
See also this related quotation.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
Any 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 cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.
It is a terrible, an inexorable law, that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) American novelist, playwright, activist
“Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” Esquire (Jul 1960)
Full text.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) American novelist, playwright, activist
“Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem,” Esquire (Jul 1960)
(Source)
I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.
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.
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.
I imagine that the reason that people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they are afraid that if they let go of the hate, they will have to deal with pain.
Let me point out to you that freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be. One hasn’t got to have an enormous military in order to be unfree when it’s simpler to be asleep, when it’s simpler to be apathetic, when it’s simpler, in fact, not to want to be free, to think that something else is more important.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) American novelist, playwright, activist
“Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,” speech, San Francisco College (22 Oct 1960)
(Source)
Later published in Nobody Knows My Name (1961).
At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American White man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) American novelist, playwright, activist
“Stranger in a Village,” Harper’s Magazine (Oct 1953)
(Source)
Reprinted in Notes of a Native Son (1955).
It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, or 6, or 7, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) American novelist, playwright, activist
“The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro,” opening comments, Cambridge Union, Cambridge, England (17 Feb 1965)
(Source)
Debate with William F. Buckley, Jr.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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 purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it -– at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) American novelist, playwright, activist
“The Negro Child — His Self-Image,” speech (16 Oct 1963)
(Source)
Speech to educators, first published as "A Talk to Teachers," The Saturday Review (21 Dec 1963). The thesis above is restatated at the end in these words, more frequently quoted: "I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person."
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
All 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.
It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) American novelist, playwright, activist
“Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare”
(Source)
You cannot fix what you cannot face.
Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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.
If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected — those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! — and listens to their testimony.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
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.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) American novelist, playwright, activist
In “The Negro After Watts,” Time (27 Aug 1965)
(Source)
Article placed in the Congressional Record by Robert Byrd (24 Aug 1965).
Art has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too — the terms with which they are connected to other people.
It is not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James Baldwin (1924-1987) American novelist, playwright, activist
Interview, Life Magazine (24 May 1963)
See also this related quotation.