James Baldwin Quotes

James Baldwin

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 2, 1924

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

James Baldwin

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

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.

James Baldwin

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

James Baldwin

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

James Baldwin

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

James Baldwin

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

James Baldwin

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

James Baldwin

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

James Baldwin