James Baldwin

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

"If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."

"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."

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

"The most crucial time in any person's development is infancy."

"Do your work. Do it well. The rest is madness."

"We are capable of bearing a great deal once we understand we have to, once it is accepted that this is the price we must pay."

"People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become."

"The writer is committed to a vision, and cannot renege on that."

"Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act."

"Money, it has been said, is the root of all evil. And yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes."

"Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go."

"The perpetually fearful can never be free."

"Hatred is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated."

"To be sensual, I think, is to respect the body and to indulge it."

"You write in order to change the world."

"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."

"It is impossible to watch the sunset and not dream."

"The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see."

"Silence is a political weapon of great power."

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

"We cannot be free until they are free."

"An identity is questioned only when it is questioned; there is no such thing as an identity until it is challenged."

"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."

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side."

"Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be."

"What is ghetto anyway but the distance between the world and myself?"

"Education is in the business of changing lives."

"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."