Link Copied!
James Baldwin Quotes (1924-1987)
Writer, Playwright, Novelist
-100px.png)
About James Baldwin
James Arthur Baldwin (2 August 1924 – 1 December 1987) was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and social critic.
Best James Baldwin Quotes
Shortest
Earliest
Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful James Baldwin quotes.
“I am beginning to feel like part of a travelling circus.”
“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”
“You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”
“We are responsible to the future, and not to Chase Manhattan Bank. (1973)”
“Close up, the person's imperfections matter, but from far away, you see your own.”
“I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.”
“'Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker, and so you can stand less and less.'”
“The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
“I think that mankind can do better than that, and I wish to be a witness to this small and stubborn possibility.”
“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”
“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”
“Perhaps the turning point in one's life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one. (1984)”
James Baldwin Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of James Baldwin quotes by topic.
James Baldwin on History 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on History →James Baldwin on Art 2 quotes
“Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
James Baldwin on God 2 quotes
“I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.”
James Baldwin on Justice 2 quotes
“Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.”
James Baldwin on Artist 2 quotes
“One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
James Baldwin on Experience
“Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.”
James Baldwin on Intelligence
“You don't realize that you're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”
James Baldwin on Life
James Baldwin on Gay men
James Baldwin on Poverty
James Baldwin on White privilege
“White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.”
What James Baldwin Said About Others
Discover personal opinions James Baldwin shared regarding contemporaries.
James Baldwin on White people 2 quotes
“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”
James Baldwin on James Joyce 2 quotes
“Joyce is right about history being a nightmare — but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
James Baldwin on Richard Wright 2 quotes
“Richard went to Paris in 1946, when I was 22, he was 38. Now, it took me a long time; I had to get to be much older to realize something. I didn't realize it that day at all. I was not born in Mississippi; I was born in New York. And I did not leave Mississippi to go to Chicago. And endure all that. I was much too young to realize what I was looking at really. But, that's a journey. To go from Mississippi to Chicago to New York to Paris in 38 years is amazing. You might as well have walked all that distance, it's almost that remarkable.”
James Baldwin on William Faulkner 2 quotes
“It is difficult for a young person today to know what to do. You cannot take advertising seriously; you cannot be truly involved with selling, or respect yourself, if the product you make is meant to become obsolete in a year or two. There is very little real, important work to do. And where there is no work, something goes, because we discover through working what we cannot discover any other way. As Faulkner says, you cannot make love eight hours a day, or drink or walk eight hours a day. You have to do something with your life, you have to find out what it is.”
James Baldwin on Charles Dickens 2 quotes
“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 ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.”
James Baldwin on Ernest Hemingway
“I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”
James Baldwin on Jimmy Carter
“The situations of the Wilmington 10, and the Charlotte 3, are very small symptoms of the monstrous and continuing wrong for which you, as the elected leader, are now responsible…I must add, in honor, that I write to you because I love our country: And you, in my lifetime, are the only president to whom I would have written.”
James Baldwin on Muhammad Ali
“When we marched on Montgomery, the Confederate flag was flying from the dome of the Capitol: this gesture can be interpreted as insurrection. But when Muhammad Ali decided to be true to his faith and refused to join the Army, the wrath of an entire Republic was visited on his head, he was stripped of his title, and was not allowed to work. In short, his countrymen decided to break him, and it is not their virtue that they failed. It is his virtue.”
James Baldwin on Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“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 ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.”
James Baldwin on Alex Haley
“Alex Haley's taking us back through time to the village of his ancestors is an act of faith and courage, but this book is also an act of love, and it is this which makes it haunting…"Roots" is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one-the action of love, or the effect of the absence of love, in time. It suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can't but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us. Well, we can perish in this vehicle, children, or we can move on up the road.”
James Baldwin on Henry A. Wallace
“the Progressive Party, with its extravagant claims, has, therefore, imposed on itself the considerable burden of proof. The only party within recent memory which made equally strident claims of fellowship were the Communists, who failed to survive this test; and the only politician of similar claims was, of course, Wallace's erstwhile master, Roosevelt, who did not after all, now that the magic of his voice is gone, succeed in raising the darker brother to the status of a citizen. This is the ancestry of the Wallace party, and it does not work wholly in its favor. It operates to give pause to even the most desperate and the most gullible.”
Quotes About James Baldwin
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about James Baldwin from others.
Maya Angelou on James Baldwin
“James Baldwin was born for truth. It called upon him to tell it on the mountains, to preach it in Harlem, to sing it on the Left Bank in Paris. His honesty and courage would lead him to see truth and to write truth in poetry, drama, fiction, and essay. He was a giant.”
Michael Bronski on James Baldwin
“James Baldwin's 1955 Giovanni's Room and 1962 Another Country dealt with the complicated intersections of sexuality and race through homosexual characters. As early as 1949, in his essay "The Preservation of Innocence," Baldwin directly connected heterosexual hostility toward homosexuals to white hostility toward African Americans. He saw both as a failure of the imagination to connect fully with one's own humanity. He explores this idea in his 1963 The Fire Next Time: "White people in this country 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."”
Angela Davis on James Baldwin 2 quotes
“The one thing that did excite me during that freshman year was the news that James Baldwin was scheduled to deliver a series of lectures on literature. Since I had first discovered Go Tell It on the Mountain, I read all of Baldwin's writings I could find. When he came to Brandeis, I made sure I captured a front seat. But he had hardly gotten into his lecturing when the news broke that the world was teetering on the edge of the abyss of World War III. The Cuban Missile Crisis had erupted. James Baldwin announced that he could not continue his lectures without contradicting his moral conscience and abdicating his political responsibilities.”
Henry Louis Gates Jr. on James Baldwin
“He named for me the things you feel but couldn't utter... articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time.”
Henry Giroux on James Baldwin
“I want to conclude by quoting from James Baldwin, a courageous writer who refused to let the hope of democracy die in his lifetime and who offered that mix of politics, passion and courage that deserves not just admiration but emulation. His sense of rage was grounded in a working-class sensibility, eloquence and passion that illuminates a higher standard for what it means to be a public intellectual and an engaged intellectual. His words capture something that is missing from the American cultural and political landscape, something affirmative that needs to be seized upon, rethought, and occupied - as part of both the fight against the new authoritarianism and its cynical, dangerous and cruel practices, and the struggle to reclaim a notion of justice and mutuality that seems to be dying in all of us.”
Bonnie Greer on James Baldwin
“The person who first moved me and still does is the late African-American author James Baldwin. I was 12 when I read his first book, Go Tell It On the Mountain, about his childhood in Harlem in the Thirties. He nailed the emotions I felt right on the head and I read all his subsequent books.”
Dilip Hiro on James Baldwin 2 quotes
“He gave up preaching four years later, but at heart, James Baldwin remains a Baptist preacher—note the titles of his books and the main quotations, all Biblical—prophesying hell and fire, relishing the idea of the day when all America will be "levelled": full of guilt at having become a commercial and literary success; anxious not to make his "private peace" with the establishment; and neurotic about not losing touch with the ordinary blacks. He is a tormented man, a state of mind he seems to enjoy. A true Baptist Christian indeed; not a Marxist revolutionary.”
Ekua Holmes on James Baldwin
Langston Hughes on James Baldwin
“A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity.”
Mariame Kaba on James Baldwin
“SWAT teams, battering rams, and no-knock warrants (immortalized by Gil Scott Heron and written about by James Baldwin), all predate contemporary hyper-militarized police forces.”
Jonathan Ned Katz on James Baldwin
“In the 1940s James Baldwin, Robert Duncan, and Jo Sinclair published pioneering works affirming the homosexual’s humanity.”
Valerie Miner on James Baldwin
“I was also influenced by James Baldwin because, although he wasn't a reporter per se, he wrote wonderful essays raising really important social questions in this accessible, literary, elegant style.”
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to James Baldwin
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
About James Baldwin
James Arthur Baldwin (2 August 1924 – 1 December 1987) was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and social critic.