QUOTES FROM JAMES BALDWIN, AMERICAN AUTHOR
'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.'
James Baldwin The Fire Next Time
'Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.'
James Baldwin The Fire Next Time
'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'
James Baldwin The Fire Next Time
'Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.'
James Baldwin The Fire Next Time
'Whoever debases others is debasing himself.'
James Baldwin The Fire Next Time
'If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.'
James Baldwin The Fire Next Time
'how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?'
James Baldwin The Fire Next Time
'You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying 'You exaggerate.' They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine- but trust your experience. Know whence you came.'
James Baldwin The Fire Next Time
[From the MSC Justice Desk]
