James Baldwin
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
“Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness.”
“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.”
“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
“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 art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.”
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”
“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”