James Baldwin

"One cannot accept a world in which one's life has no meaning or value."

"The artist is here to disturb the peace; to tell us all the things we have chosen to ignore."

"Power does not have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping."

"We can make America what America must become."

"To be black in America is in some ways like being inoculated against optimism."

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does."

"I cannot imagine a more powerful revelation than that moment when I was forced to realize I had been looking at the world from a narrow perspective."

"The future is like heaven—everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now."

"One of the aches of maturity is the realization that we cannot change the world."

"The only people who seem to have any sure knowledge are the ones who work the hardest."

"You think you understand America, but you do not understand America at all."

"The role of the intellectual is to elucidate the questions that the masses are afraid to ask."

"Silence is not the absence of language; silence is the language of the oppressed."

"The price of the ticket is the price of admission into the human race."

"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."

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

"The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."

"You can't deny the humanity of people whose rights you have oppressed."

"I think what the unexamined life reveals, finally, is that no one is free until we are all free."

"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."

"Education is in the main the instrument which is used to acclimate the young to the social order."

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does."

"There are days when I bemoan the fact that I cannot fly, but on the whole I do not regret being earthbound."

"It is a great shock at a certain age to realize that your parents are only human beings on an adventure."

"Any upheaval in the world order is terrifying to those invested in the old order."

"You write in order to change the world."

"The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world."

"Whoever debases others is debasing himself."

"If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are said about you, you begin to believe them."

"One cannot protest what one does not fully understand."