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

James A. Baldwin

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

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" 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. "

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" When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living. "

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" 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. "

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" Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours. "

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" The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory. "

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

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" The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose. "

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" Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. "

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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

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" The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love. "

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" Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. "

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" I want to be an honest man and a good writer. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. "

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

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" People can cry much easier than they can change. "

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" The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in. "

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" No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time. "

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" Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned. "

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" 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. "

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