– James A. Baldwin, 25. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity. Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. – James A. Baldwin, 4. Love him and let him love you. “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.” –James A. Baldwin, 103. In the United States of America, we’re fortunate American powers—those pale, corporate men who believe in the almighty accumulation of wealth and acquiring monstrous power and not much else—treat children and poets as inconsequential, some innocuous foolishness by those without leverage if they ever think of them at all. I was involved in the military (USAF) for eight years (four years active non-combat duty during Vietnam) and have recently joined with my high school classmates (75% African-American, my roots are in Eastern Europe) to try to form an alumni group to help the current students in Buffalo, NY (majority A-A and other people of color). It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.” – James A. Baldwin, 89. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. “Books taught me that things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me to everyone who is alive and who had ever been alive.”― James Baldwin, 84. – James A. Baldwin, 17. “If you cannot love me, I will die. ” ― James Baldwin, 35. He had a difficult childhood, growing up in poverty and spending much of his early years caring for his younger siblings. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.” – James A. Baldwin, 94. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” – James A. Baldwin, 101. “Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore” ― James Baldwin, 33. “When a dark face opens, light seems to go everywhere.”― James Baldwin, 64. “The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.”― James Baldwin, 74. I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. We would love to hear all about in the comment section below. “There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.” – James A. Baldwin. “I know that people can be better than they are. – James A. Baldwin, 19. “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” ― James Baldwin Read more quotes from James Baldwin Powerful authoritarian men might still consider swatting and killing a bee in their presence but never notice a butterfly. Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. All my best wishes in your retirement, 716-244-1856 (text or voice anytime), Your email address will not be published. “One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself – that is to say, risking oneself. Interviews and Podcasts on Everyday Power, The Art of Losing: Your Behavior in Defeat Matters, Searching For Inner Peace Was an Essential Lesson I Learned in 2020, If 2020 Triggered You at Every Turn, You Are Not Alone. The fact that more people have not written about Trump’s comingling of ignorance and power demonstrates how absolute power effectively silences critics, as Trump and his minions in the Republican Party have done. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. “I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. “What a great difference there is,’ she said, ‘between dreaming of something and dealing with it!”― James Baldwin, 60. 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