It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
- Topic: Choice, Courage, Decision, Freedom
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from James Baldwin
We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.
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.
You write in order to change the world…the world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimetre the way people look at reality, then you change it.
The longer I live, the more deeply l learn that love - whether we call it friendship or family or romance is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light.
Read, read, read. Never stop reading. And when you can't read anymore… write.
The only way to live, is knowing you’re going to die. If you're afraid to die, you'll never be able to live.
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Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or good or joy worth having.
I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.
Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut afterwards.
Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives.
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.
You can’t change how people treat you or what they say about you. All you can do is change how you react to it.
You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.
Here must all distrust be left behind; all cowardice must be ended.
Most obstacles melt away when we make up our minds to walk boldly through them.
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.
You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.
Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even dearth is one of the things that Nature wills.
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the induction of a new order of things.
Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.
It is your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.
The hardest thing to explain is the glaring evident which everybody had decided not to see.
When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.
Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.
The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you.
Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.
I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you are not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.
Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.
They [the Americans] have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
What light is to the eyes - what air is to the lungs - what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
When even one American, who has done nothing wrong, is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril.
The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Never cross a man, not afraid to die.
Our task must be to free ourselves…by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. . . Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse.
You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.
They fear love because it creates a world they can't control.
