75 James Baldwin Quotes That Tell the Story of Black America
Quotes pulled from interviews, speeches, letters, and novels by James Baldwin.
Essayist. Activist. Visionary. Playwright. Queer, Black Man. Revolutionary. James Baldwin is all of this and more. Some fall in love with his characters and others find solace in his righteous anger but the one thing we all have in common is a reverence for the way he uses prose to shift consciousness. Best known for Notes of a Native Son, If Beale Street Could Talk, and The Fire Next Time, Baldwin’s words and full portrayals of Black characters gave wind to a Black consciousness movement of the late 20th century and remain timeless portals into understanding race, sexuality and the thirst for justice.
Below are 75 quotes pulled from essays, interviews, speeches, letters and novels by James Baldwin. Curated and woven to tell the story of Baldwin’s life, you will watch his politicization and feel as though they were written today. Whether you are new to his work or are looking for a way to make sense of today’s racial justice uprisings, I know the quotes below will give you food for both thought and action.
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Best James Baldwin Quotes
1. “Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.”
2. “To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.”
3. “For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
4. “I don’t consider myself a spokesman—I have always thought it would be rather presumptuous.”
5. “The American Negro has had to accommodate a vast amount of hatred since he’s been here.”
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6. “The standards of the civilization into which you are born are first outside of you, and by the time you get to be a man they're inside of you.”
7. “Long before the Negro child perceives this difference, and even longer before he understands it, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it. Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment.”
8. “When I write a play or a novel, I write the ending and am responsible for it. Tolstoy has every right to throw Anna Karenina under the train. She begins in his imagination, and he has to take responsibility for her until the reader does. But the life of a living human being, no one writes it. You cannot deal with another human being as though he were a fictional creation.” (In an interview with David C. Estes)
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9. “If you walk out of Harlem, ride out of Harlem, downtown, the world agrees what you see is much bigger, cleaner, whiter, richer, safer than where you are. They collect the garbage. People obviously can pay their life insurance. Their children look happy, safe. You’re not. And you go back home, and it would seem that, of course, that it’s an act of God that this is true! That you belong where white people have put you.”
10. “It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the country to which you have pledged allegiance along with everyone else has not pledged allegiance to you.”
11. “You can’t teach a child if the situation in which he is studying is intolerable... no Negro child who is going to a segregated school, which costs millions of dollars, is fooled about why he’s there. He’s there because white people want him there and no place else.”
12. “I was a black kid and was expected to write from that perspective. Yet I had to realize the black perspective was dictated by the white imagination.”
13. “What is happening in this country among the young, and not only the black young, is an overwhelming suspicion that it's not worth it.”
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14. “There seemed to be no way whatever to remove this cloud that stood between them and the sun, between them and love and life and power, between them and whatever it was that they wanted.”
15. “As far as I knew when I was very, very young there’d never been anything … called a black writer.”
16. “You have somehow to begin to break out of all of that and try to become yourself. It’s hard for anybody, but it’s very hard if you’re born black in a white society.”
17. “The price in this country to survive at all still is to become a white man.”'
18. “In order to achieve the life I wanted, I had been dealt, it seemed to me, the worst possible hand.”
19. “Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”
20. “I could not sing. I could not dance. I had been well conditioned by the world in which I grew up, so I did not yet dare take the idea of becoming a writer seriously.”
21. “I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way.”
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22. “I moved to Europe in 1948 because I was trying to become a writer and couldn’t find in my surroundings, in my country, a certain stamina, a certain corroboration that I needed.”
23. “In New York the color of my skin stood between myself and me, but in Europe that barrier was down.”
24. “Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”
25. “One cannot be romantic about human nature; one cannot be romantic about one's own nature.”
26. “I envisage a world which is almost impossible to imagine in this country. A world in which race would count for nothing.”
27. “It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.”
28. “Communication is a two-way street, really, it’s a matter of listening to one another.”
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29. “Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.”
30. On becoming a writer: “I’d been a preacher for three years, from age fourteen to seventeen. Those were three years which probably turned me to writing.”
31. On writing himself into the narrative: “I had the idea that most people found me a hostile black boy; I was not that. I had to find a way to make them know it, and the only way was to use myself.”
32. “I’ve been compelled in some ways by describing my circumstances to learn to live with them. It’s not the same thing as accepting them.”
33. “The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”
34. “I’ve never written a speech. I can’t read a speech. It’s kind of give-and-take. You have to sense the people you’re talking to. You have to respond to what they hear.”
35. “I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it.”
36. “I couldn’t sit somewhere honing my talent to a fine edge after I had been to all those places in the South and seen those boys and girls, men and women, black and white, longing for change. It was impossible for me to drop them a visit and then leave.”
37. “The question of colour hides the graver questions of the self and that’s why the whole thing is so hard to overcome and why It’s so dangerous for our society.”
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38. “My experience with liberals, they have attitudes, and they have all the proper attitudes. But they have no real convictions, and when the chips are down and you expect them to deliver and what you thought they felt they somehow are not there.”
39. When asked by Esquire what white people should say to fellow white people: “That if I go under in this country—I, the black man—he goes, too.”
40. “Black power frightens them. White power doesn't frighten them. Stokely is not, you know, bombing a country out of existence. Nor menacing your children. White power is doing that.”
41. “One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in their chains.”
42. In the New Yorker, 1962: “God is black.”
43. “They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.”
44. “You can't have a war on poverty unless you are willing to attack those people [in power] and limit their profits.”
45. “The differences between the North and the South were really evident when the chips were down. They had different techniques of castrating you in the South than they had in the North, but the fact of the castration remained exactly the same, and that was the intention in both places.”
46. In a debate against William F. Buckley in 1965: “The Southern oligarchy, which has still today so very much power in Washington, and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat, and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave.And no one can challenge that statement. It is a matter of historical record.”
47. “We know that democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.”
48. “[Lorraine Hansberry] was very worried about a civilization which could produce those five policeman standing on the Negro woman's neck. In Birmingham, or wherever it was. And I am too. I'm terrified At the moral apathy. The death of the heart. Which is happening in my country.”
49. “The question really is a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what is happening on the other side of the wall because you don’t want to know.”
50. “The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—was to make black people despise themselves.”
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51. “If you have people up in the United States Senate filibustering about whether or not you are human, then obviously you are going to have a reaction in the streets.”
52. “I speak of change not on the surface but in the depth—change in the sense of renewal.”
53. “One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning what it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it can be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special interests—is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect it. One glance at the American leaders (or figure-heads) conveys that America is on the edge of absolute chaos, and also suggests the future to which American interests, if not the bulk of the American people, appear willing to consign the blacks.”
54. “I don't believe you do the right thing because you think it's the right thing. I think you may be forced to do it because it will be the expedient thing. Which is good enough.”
55. “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”
56. “I object to the term "looters" because I wonder who is looting whom, baby.”
57. “What causes the eruptions, the riots, the revolts- whatever you want to call them- is the despair of being in a static position, absolutely static, of watching your father, your brother, your uncle, or your cousin- no matter how old the black cat is or how young- who has no future.”
58. “[This revolution] is for Negroes to liberate themselves and their children from the economic and social sanctions imposed on them because they were slaves here.”
59. “We call it riots, because they were black people. We wouldn't call it riots if they were white people.”
60. “What [Stokely Carmichael] is suggesting that frightens the American white people is that the Black people in this country are tied to subjugated people everywhere in the world.”
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61. “Pressure is being brought to bear by the people in the streets, especially by the poor and by the young, so that movement leaders are always in a position of having to assess, very carefully, their tactics.”
62. “If the American Negro, the American black man, is going to become a free person in this country, the people of this country have to give up something. If they don't give it up, it will be taken from them.”
63. “Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial war.”
64. On restoring peace: “It is not the black people who have to cool it.”
65. “What we need is somebody who can coalesce the energies in this country, which are now both black and white, into another party which can respond to the needs of the people.”
66. “We must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is.”
67. “We have to make our own definitions and begin to rule the world that way because kids white and black cannot use what they have been given.”
68. “It’s a very mysterious endeavor, isn’t it. And the key is love.”
69. “It’s really an attack on the white man’s assumption that he knows more about you than you do, that he knows what’s best for you, and that he can keep you in your place for your own good and also for his own profit.”
70. (In an interview with Robert Penn Warren) “In order to accommodate me, in order to overcome so many centuries of cruelty and bad faith and genocide and fear, all the American institutions and all the American values, public and private, will have to change. The Democratic Party will have to become a different party, for example."
71. “If you don't look at it, you can't change it. You've got to look at it.”
72. “I believe that the unexamined life is not worth living, and the writer certainly cannot afford any self-delusion for his subject is himself and the world he is in.”
73. “The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors. Why is my freedom or my citizenship, or my right to live there, how is it conceivably a question now?”
74. “Once you realize that you can do something, it would be difficult to live with yourself if you didn’t do it.”
75. “Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can.”
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