James A. Baldwin

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

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

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

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.