Zitat des Tages von James Baldwin:
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
It was books that 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.
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 only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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.
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
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.
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.
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.
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
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.
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
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.
