Top 100 Baldwin Quotes
#1. But it's not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can't forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the world forever. It's not possible to forget anybody you've destroyed.
James Baldwin
#3. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.
James Baldwin
#4. I would rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck.
Stanley Baldwin
#5. Observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.
James Baldwin
#6. One of the truest things to commit to is your own nature.
Alec Baldwin
#7. I remember what it was ... to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.
James Baldwin
#8. Baldwin often times stumbles over the truth, but he always picks himself up and hurries on as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill
#9. I like the Baldwin boys a great deal. Alec is super-smart, super-articulate, almost too smart to be an actor.
Anthony LaPaglia
#10. Every white person in this country-and I do not care what he or she says-knows one thing. They may not know, as they put, "what I want",but they know they would not like to be black here.
If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.
James Baldwin
#11. If Obama was white, he'd be up by 17 points.
Alec Baldwin
#12. And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.
James Baldwin
#13. It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
James A. Baldwin
#14. Venice, Italy, is one of my favorite cities, a place I've been lucky enough to visit twice.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#15. (Antique clocks) need servicing just like your automobile or anything else. They're mechanical, and about every 10 years you should have them cleaned. That's the way they last forever.
William Baldwin
#16. I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch - I hoped to drive out fire with fire.
James Baldwin
#17. Getting movies made is not as difficult as people think. Making movies is easy. You get a script, you get a director, you raise the money, you make the movie.
Stephen Baldwin
#18. Don't get me wrong, there are sometimes if I go and see a really funny comedy, that I wished I had smoked a joint. I'll be honest with you. That's the truth.
Stephen Baldwin
#19. Elisha,' he said, 'no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember - please remember - I was saved. I was there.
James Baldwin
#20. My grandmother died from Alzheimer's, and it was a big shock. For the families left behind, it is not an easy closure. It's not a gradual fading. The person is losing so much of their humanity as they're dying. Losing your memories, you lose so much of who you are as a person.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#21. I never knew any painter worthy of the name who paid the smallest attention to what a critic says, even in conversation.
Robert Baldwin Ross
#22. A statesman wants courage and a statesman wants vision; but believe me, after six months' experience, he wants first, second, third and all the time - patience.
Stanley Baldwin
#23. We may differ widely in environments, education, learning, knowledge, or lack of it, and in our personalities, our likes and dislikes. But if we set ourselves the task, we'll find a meeting place somehow and somewhere.
Faith Baldwin
#25. There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet ... I'm not going to forget it.
James Baldwin
#26. Spiritual empowerment is evidenced in our lives by our willingness to tell ourselves the truth, to listen to the truth when it's told to us, and to dispense truth as lovingly as possible, when we feel compelled to talk from the heart.
Christina Baldwin
#27. To those looking on with interest, and there were plenty of gawking eyes fixed on her, she supposed she appeared to be gliding with ease. But in truth, the crushing weight of her charmed life made each demure step as tortuous as a death march.
Carey Baldwin
#28. I have to start with elements of myself, which is what you always do as an actor.
Kate Baldwin
#29. The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people that know the truth about us. Soldiers don't, statesmen don't, priests don't, union leaders don't ... only the poets.
James Baldwin
#31. If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so bad.
James Baldwin
#33. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
James Baldwin
#34. Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
James A. Baldwin
#35. There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.
James Baldwin
#36. Everybody I've ever worked with - 99.9 percent of the time, I've had a successful or very agreeable experience with.
Alec Baldwin
#37. There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.
James Baldwin
#38. For me, I've never been too concerned of what people think of me, so now as the youngest Baldwin brother in Hollywood making movies while simultaneously being a charismatic evangelical born again Christian who's an evangelist - that's a pretty crazy combination.
Stephen Baldwin
#39. He wanted me to come home
to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.
James Baldwin
#40. But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded.
James Baldwin
#41. You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.
James Baldwin
#42. I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years
James Baldwin
#43. Life is rather like a long train ride; you may encounter a great many people, but looking out from your own small compartment of self you catch only a glimpse of other people's joy or despair.
Faith Baldwin
#45. The real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road - and the road has a trick of being the most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright - and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.
James Baldwin
#46. When human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.
James A. Baldwin
#47. There's less critical thinking going on in this country on a Main Street level - forget about the media - than ever before. We've never needed people to think more critically than now, and they've taken a big nap.
Alec Baldwin
#48. I collect travel alarm clocks. I was in a flea market in France once, in 1994, and I opened up this beautiful Jaeger-LeCoultre folding eight-day winding clock folded into a beautiful case, and I went, 'Wow, man.' And I've been collecting travel alarm clocks since 1994.
Alec Baldwin
#50. Let us never forget this: since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defense of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies.
Stanley Baldwin
#51. In Socrates' thought the two marks of individual self-consciousness appear; it is practical and it is social.
James Mark Baldwin
#53. For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
James Baldwin
#54. There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.
James Baldwin
#55. For years, I've felt an obligation to harvest an animal, since all my life I've so mindlessly consumed them. But that was from the safety of my desk.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#56. Now, for the first time, I began to be aware of my heart, the heart itself: and with this awareness, conscious terror came. I realized that I knew nothing whatever about the way we are put together; and I realized that what I did not know might be in the process of killing me.
James Baldwin
#57. Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
James Baldwin
#58. In the absence of big budgets, start-ups learned how to hack the system to build their companies.
Micah Baldwin
#60. If I add a negative element to the piece, you are not a villain necessarily but you bring a stronger, more negative aspect to the film, and if you don't do that, the film goes off balance where you can't worry about likability, you have to come in and play the part the best way that you can.
Alec Baldwin
#61. The best thing about candy is that it can't be spoiled by the adult world. Candy is innocent.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#62. Tintin comics evoke Bermuda, where my parents doled out comics for good behavior and my grandmother taught me how to shuffle cards.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#63. It had been so once; it had almost been so once. I could make it so again, I could make it real. It only demanded a short, hard strength for me to become myself again.
James Baldwin
#64. People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.
James Baldwin
#65. One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you.
Faith Baldwin
#67. I never walked out the door and said, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest Baldwin brother of them all?"
Alec Baldwin
#68. Hope? The word seemed to bang from wall to wall. Hope? No, I don't think there's any hope. We're too empty here ... She touched her heart. This isn't a country at all, it's a collection of football players and Eagle Scouts. Cowards. We think we're happy. We're not. We're doomed.
James Baldwin
#69. Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.
James Baldwin
#70. In my grandfather's lab, scientists did independent research, and peers reviewed and commented on its merits. Politics, he taught me, had no place in the scientific process.
Tammy Baldwin
#71. Show (don't tell) your customers that you have good quality by actually delivering fresh coffee and tea. Intelligent people are active recipients of information, and prefer to reach conclusions by themselves.
Jerry Baldwin
#72. There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.
James Baldwin
#73. Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.
Winston Churchill
#74. Evergreen had opened up a whole new world to me. There I met many internationally celebrated people: there I was surrounded by the best art and music, as well as conversation. I knew I could never return to the life I had led before.
Billy Baldwin
#75. She marched into the street, found a liquor store and bought a bottle; and the weight of the bottle in her straw handbag somehow made everything real; as the purchase of a railroad ticket proves the imminence of a journey.
James Baldwin
#76. John Ventimiglia, who was on 'The Sopranos,' was in my first acting class and we have been friends since that time. Alec Baldwin was in my class back then, Sean Young and Andrew McCarthy.
Michael Imperioli
#77. You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
James Baldwin
#78. Yves did not like showers, he preferred long, scalding baths, with newspapers, cigarettes, and whiskey on a chair next to the bathtub, and with Eric nearby to talk to, to shampoo his hair, and to scrub his back.
James Baldwin
#79. I always did think that when I turned 40, I'd start coming into my own.
Adam Baldwin
#80. The only defense is offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you wish to save yourselves.
Stanley Baldwin
#82. Lunch is the best time of day to eat in Paris. Then you get to go walk it off afterwards.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#83. Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.
James Baldwin
#84. When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#85. From day one, I have always been open about my sexual orientation.
Tammy Baldwin
#86. Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.
James A. Baldwin
#87. You can be someone running ... who is just a soaring leader of people. But if you don't have the finances down, you're going to have a problem.
Alec Baldwin
#88. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played - and play - in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know. The
James Baldwin
#89. The former measured six feet and an inch in his stockings, and, without a single pound of cumbrous flesh about him, weighed a hundred and eighty. The latter was an inch shorter than his rival, and ten pounds lighter; but he was much the most active of the two.
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet
#90. He was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.
James Baldwin
#91. Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow!
James Baldwin
#92. I was 23 when I learned how to cook; I grew up around the same time. It was precisely then that Thanksgiving started to mean something more. Growing up, Christmas was always about me, and eventually you, when I finally started to enjoy the giving part. But Thanksgiving is always about us.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#93. Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
James A. Baldwin
#94. I thought, 'My God, I'm gonna make $15,000 a week for 13 weeks.' What would I do with that kind of money? You know, I had never seen anything like that before in my life.
Daniel Baldwin
#95. There should be a name for the syndrome that occurs when you're in Paris and you already miss it.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#96. Wonder is not a Pollyanna stance, not a denial of reality; wonder is an acknowledgement of the power of the mind to transform, to notice, to decide what experience shall mean.
Christina Baldwin
#97. No British Prime Minister of the last seventy years has been more harshly stereotyped than Stanley Baldwin. No one has been so much ignored, after the initial judgements of contemporaries had been made.
Stanley Baldwin
#98. The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
James A. Baldwin
#99. There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one
you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.
James A. Baldwin
#100. John's heart was hardened against the Lord. His father was God's minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.
James Baldwin
