James Baldwin Negro Quotes

#1. But the Negro's experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live.

James Baldwin

#2. To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

James Baldwin

#3. The Lord said unto me, 'I will take my rest and I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs.

Anonymous

#4. When the South has trouble with its Negroes when the Negroes refuse to remain in their "place" it blames "outside agitators" and "Northern interference." When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.

James A. Baldwin

#5. I always had an easier time with adults. Somehow, I was always old! I still feel old.

Gillian Jacobs

#6. All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

James A. Baldwin

#7. There's something about winning Miss America that brings out the snark.

Gretchen Carlson

#8. It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things.

James Baldwin

#9. An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.

James A. Baldwin

#10. You can swim (uncomfortably) in water at a temperature slightly above freezing; a tiny drop in temperature-or a miracle-allows you to walk on water.

Craig F. Bohren

#11. You can fall in the area of your strength as easily as you could fall in the area of your weakness.

Johnny Hunt

#12. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt.

Richard P. Feynman

#13. 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

#14. When you lose someone, they take a bigger place in your heart, not a smaller one. Every day it grows, because you don't stop loving them. You wish you could talk to them. You need their advice. But life doesn't always give us what we need, and it's difficult.

Adriana Trigiani

#15. Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

James A. Baldwin

#16. 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

#17. Confidence sometimes requires purposeful preparation and practice.

Sam Owen

#18. It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

James Baldwin

#19. Why are you here? Did you come to try to kill me again?" "Oddly enough, no. I - I had a bad dream. I needed to talk to someone.

Kendare Blake

#20. Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.

Brad Warner

#21. Our people" have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.

James Baldwin

#22. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed. People

James Baldwin

#23. White people ... have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this
which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never
the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

James Baldwin