But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
AUTHOR QUOTES
Quotes by James Baldwin
Explore 18 verified and sourced quotes attributed to James Baldwin. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
EXPLORE BY TOPIC
Selected quotes by James Baldwin
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.
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.
If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
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.
The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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.
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
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.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
Related author collections
Explore authors represented in the same topics.