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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. "

James A. Baldwin

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" A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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

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

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

James A. Baldwin

" Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law. "

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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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" 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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" Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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

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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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" You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. "

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" Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality. "

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

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

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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. "

James A. Baldwin

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

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