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

James A. Baldwin

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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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" 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. "

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

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

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" Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. "

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

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

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" Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent. "

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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. "

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. "

James A. Baldwin

" 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

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

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

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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. "

James A. Baldwin

" Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it. "

James A. Baldwin

" 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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" 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. "

James A. Baldwin

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

James A. Baldwin

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

James A. Baldwin

" 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. "

James A. Baldwin

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

James A. Baldwin

" 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. "

James A. Baldwin

" 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. "

James A. Baldwin

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

James A. Baldwin

" 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. "

James A. Baldwin