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Danh ngôn của James Baldwin (Sứ mệnh: 5)

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.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
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.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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.
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.
The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
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.
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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 the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
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.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
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.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
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.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
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 South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.