Top 100 Baldwin's Quotes
#1. James Baldwin's words haunt: "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." Are we a nation of monsters?
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
#2. When I was 10, I read James Baldwin's 'Another Country,' and that book broke me. Not because I was encountering homosexual sex and love for the first time, but because the way James wrote about it made it impossible for me to attach otherness to it. 'Here,' Jimmy said. 'Here is love, all of it.
Chris Abani
#3. There's something in there," Matt said. "Something alive. It punched me."
"Punched you?" Baldwin's face screwed up. "Are you sure a bat didn't fly into you? I bet there are a few in there."
Matt rubbed his tender jaw. "Unless its name is Bruce Wayne, that wasn't a bat.
K.L. Armstrong
#4. 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
#5. (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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.
James Baldwin
#15. One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you.
Faith Baldwin
#16. I never walked out the door and said, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest Baldwin brother of them all?"
Alec Baldwin
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. A lot of people want to not wear a tie when they go to a restaurant. They feel they don't have to wear a tie. I think it's kind of a statement they're making. I don't know what that statement is. I haven't quite figured that out yet.
Alec Baldwin
#24. I'm not going to fight in the physical with physical weapons, because it's not a physical fight. I'm going to fight with spiritual weapons, cause it's a spiritual fight.
Stephen Baldwin
#25. He stood for a moment on the melting snow, distracted, and then began to run down the hill, feeling himself fly as the descent became more rapid, and thinking: I can climb back up. If it's wrong, I can always climb back up.
James Baldwin
#26. The menfolk, they die, all right. And it's us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.
James Baldwin
#27. If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected - those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! - and listens to their testimony.
James A. Baldwin
#28. I've been to MTV and all of that worldly stuff. It's death. It's meaningless.
Stephen Baldwin
#29. Anderson Cooper has a job to do. And that job is to try to reinforce his credibility in the gay community after the fact that you couldn't get him out of the closet for 10 years with a canister of tear gas. Now he's the sheriff; now he's running around writing everybody a ticket!
Alec Baldwin
#30. To create something new is both thrilling and excruciating at the same time. It's great to have all these choices in front of you, and to have the writers in the room so you know exactly what they meant. But the downside is you want so badly not to screw it up!
Kate Baldwin
#31. In the theater, you act more of the time. In the movies, you get to act maybe 20 or 30 minutes of the day. I love acting in movies. It's just different.
Alec Baldwin
#32. When I was a kid, we didn't eat in restaurants much, but a good report card meant my sister or I could choose anyplace in town for a dinner out, and I always picked Benny's, a dive bar near the train station, because they had the best nachos around.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#33. The one thing that disturbs me about Alec is that people don't realize that he's really funny.
Daniel Baldwin
#34. Clearly, there are a thousand and one scenarios for how someone can slip through the cracks. I'll walk down the street and see a homeless person, and I'll want to stop them and say, How did this happen? Where's your mother? Are you physically ill? Mentally ill?
William Baldwin
#35. You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.'
'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.
James Baldwin
#36. Spirituality is the sacred center out of which all life comes, including Mondays and Tuesdays and rainy Saturday afternoons in all their mundane and glorious detail ... The spiritual journey is the soul's life commingling with ordinary life.
Christina Baldwin
#37. Fiction ... It's like goading a mongoose and a cobra into battle and staying with them to see who wins.
Shauna Singh Baldwin
#38. You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
James Baldwin
#39. Brennan didn't look exactly like Raif to Shayla's eyes, but for someone who didn't know either man particularly well, they probably looked like twins, separated at birth by twenty or so years.
Marjorie F. Baldwin
#40. Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
James Baldwin
#41. Then pointing to Edwin's shoes, he said: "Those look skilfully crafted. Did you make them yourself?" "Master Baldwin made them for me. The most skilled shoemaker in the village,
Kazuo Ishiguro
#42. Doing these parts is not fun. It's challenging, but no fun. It's creepy. I would rather play the guy that throws the touchdown pass and gets carried off the field.
Alec Baldwin
#43. Paris's neighborhoods, the arrondissements, are organized like a twist. They spiral from the river like toilet water flushing in reverse and erupting out of the bowl - a corkscrew or what have you, a flattened pig's tail, a whorling braid notched one to 20.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#44. I do admire [Willie] Wonka. He's a true capitalist. His factory has zero government regulations, slave labor and an indoor boat. Wonderful.
Alec Baldwin
#45. I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room.
James Baldwin
#46. Of course, there's no reason that Paris should have decent Mexican food. It's a silly expectation - there's a Mexican population in Paris, but they're not exactly traveling there from across the border. Paris also doesn't do Peruvian all that well, either.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#47. You can't control the audience. When you're on the air and they're not coming to the party, it's time to shut down the party.
Adam Baldwin
#48. It was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knowest this man's fall, but thou knowest not his wrassling.
James Baldwin
#49. America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one's own sleep.
James A. Baldwin
#50. I've heard it said of faith that first we jump, and then we grow wings. Integrity is like that too, I think. That's what you have to gain. The sacrifice turns into a gift that is priceless.
Matt Baldwin
#51. About guns, about hunting, it's safe to say I know nothing. The last gun I fired was a musket at Boy Scout camp.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#52. I don't want to be throwing the football on the front yard when I'm 75. I mean, I'm not opposed to men doing that. But I don't think it's gonna work for me.
Alec Baldwin
#53. All of the reality TV I've done has usually been simultaneously an opportunity to create awareness or raise funds for my mom's breast cancer organization.
Stephen Baldwin
#54. I think the place we love the most is the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. It's in the 19th arrondissement. It's where I would go jogging and my wife, Rachel, and I would go for walks. It's appreciated by Parisians but it's not really known to tourists.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#55. When I do scenes with Alec Baldwin, he just stares at my boobs. That's how good of an actor he is, he finds a way.
Jane Krakowski
#56. To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
James Baldwin
#57. You don't know, and there's no way in the world for you to find out, what it's like to be a black girl in this world, and the way white men, and black men, too, baby, treat you.
James Baldwin
#59. A careful regulation of the economic impulses of society was considered as essential to man's spiritual welfare as it was to his material well-being. There was a righteous price in commerce, based on considerations of morality, as well as an economic price, reflecting the laws of supply and demand.
Lacey Baldwin Smith
#60. There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
James A. Baldwin
#61. When I was young, I'd fight everyone who insisted I'd be an actress. I'd say, 'No way. I'm going to be a veterinarian. I'm going to work at Wetzel's Pretzels.'
Ireland Baldwin
#62. All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.
James Baldwin
#63. I believe we can balance the scales if Tom Cruise would lower his quote by a mere $29 million ... I assure you my salary would not make a difference. My annual salary is the budget for Altoids on one of Tom's movies.
Alec Baldwin
#64. To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior argument and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation. It abruptly reduces the white enemy to a contest merely physical, which he can win only physically.
James Baldwin
#65. Do you know what it's like to kill a man? You just pushed a knife into living, moving skin and you realize you pierced a heart that beats against your sharp knife.
-Lucas Tyrel
L'Poni Baldwin
#66. It's great to be able to pretend you're tough but funny at the same time.
Adam Baldwin
#67. There's a monster at the end of this book. It's the blank page where the story ends and you're left alone with yourself and your thoughts.
Cecil Baldwin
#68. The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.
James A. Baldwin
#69. The worst thing any decorator can do is give a client the feeling that he's walking around somebody else's house; the rooms must belong to the owner, not to the decorator; and no rooms can have atmosphere unless they are used and lived in.
Billy Baldwin
#70. The determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
James A. Baldwin
#71. My little son, Atticus, desperately needs his dad and I haven't been there for him ... and that's sad.
Daniel Baldwin
#72. But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one's aim is to be protected from the second.
James Baldwin
#73. [American family court] is a system that is corrupt on his best day. It is like being tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged down a gravel late at night. No one can hear your cries and complaints and it is not over until they say it's over.
Alec Baldwin
#74. We've had some really good guest stars. But I have to go with Alec Baldwin as my favorite. He is so neat and such a movie star. He's handsome and quirky. I was in heaven the week he was on the set.
Nikki Cox
#75. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
James Baldwin
#76. I actually don't think there is machismo in America, unless it's the cowboy type - the silent, smoking brooder.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#77. You go into a book and you're in the dark, really. You go in with a certain fear and trembling. You know one thing. You know you will not be the same person when this voyage is over. But you don't know what's going to happen to you between getting on the boat and stepping off.
James A. Baldwin
#78. If men don't know what's happening, what they're doing, where they're going
what are women to do? If Richard doesn't know what kind of world he wants, how am I to help him make it? What am I to tell our sons?
James Baldwin
#79. Last thought: If I learned anything from the past few months, it is that things don't always go as we plan and that's OK. It's how we handle what life throws at us and who is there to support us in the end. On that note, today's to-do list: You never know THE END
Melissa Baldwin
#80. We've got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other's only hope.
James Baldwin
#81. Telling one's friends to buy a book is a waste of time. One has to produce it from one's pocket and press it into their hands. The least one can hope for is that they'll leave it lying about in their drawing-rooms and talk as though they'd read it.
Robert Baldwin Ross
#82. A lot of the television industry is so cookie-cutter. In general, there are so many shows that are easy and bland to watch. You can tune in at any time and know exactly where you are in the story arc because it's pretty much the same every week.
Adam Baldwin
#85. What's interesting about Stephen Baldwin is that me and Dana Gould were originally cast for 'Bio-Dome' - but Pauly Shore and Baldwin ended up doing it. So there's a little movie trivia for ya.
Harland Williams
#86. The purpose of life is not to maintain personal comfort; it's to grow the soul.
Christina Baldwin
#87. If you do get married, get a prenup. It's not about money at all. It's about having a document that states how you'll dissolve your marriage while you still have a shred of respect for each other.
Alec Baldwin
#88. Only the broken heart has the ghost of a chance to grieve, to forgive, to long, to transform.
Christina Baldwin, author of Life's Companion, Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice, 1990. Used with author's permission
Judith-Victoria Douglas
#89. People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people's stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not- so grotesquely- resemble human beings.
James Baldwin
#90. Let's face facts, this is visual medium, there's a very high premium put on people who are good-looking. But the minute you rely on that you get yourself in trouble. You certainly don't make a career out of that anymore as an actor.
Alec Baldwin
#91. The sunlight came into the room with the peacefulness one remembers from rooms in one's early childhood - a sunlight encountered later only in one's dreams.
James Baldwin
#92. There's nothing like fishing to pass the time and to incline toward a sort of magnificent stupidity in which nothing matters but tackle, bait, sunlight and the strike.
Faith Baldwin
#93. How can we turn our back on an endeavor which increases our children's cultural intelligence, heightens individual sensitivity and deepens our collective sense of humanity? I suggest to you that we cannot.
Alec Baldwin
#94. I'd do anything to have more kids. But that's probably not gonna happen now.
Alec Baldwin
#95. Not a lot of individuals get to refer to the Lord in their prayers as 'Dude', but he's doing a new thing with me.
Stephen Baldwin
#96. The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.
James Baldwin
#97. It's a blessing because the Baldwin vibe on the street is what I live for the most. I think our name is something that a lot of people get a good feeling about and brings a smile to their face, and we're very fortunate.
Stephen Baldwin
#98. I have no idea what goes on in another person's mind. As a legislator, I need to be good at persuading people, counting votes and getting to 50 percent plus one. I don't go back and say, 'Why did this person get to the right position?' It's only, 'Are you yes or are you no?'
Tammy Baldwin
#99. According to God's word, everybody at some point is going to be given the opportunity to know the truth.
Stephen Baldwin
#100. I don't believe there's a white man in this country, baby, who can get his dick hard, without he hear some nigger moan.
James Baldwin
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