James A. Baldwin

“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.”

“Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.”

“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.”

“The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.”

“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment the time is always now.”

“The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.”

“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.”

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.”

“Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.”

“The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war love is a growing up.”

“I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

“Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?”

“Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.”

“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.”

“I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.”

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

“The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.”

“The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.”

“If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.”

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.”