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.
- Topic: Awareness, Change, Perception
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from James Baldwin
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.
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.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
Read, read, read. Never stop reading. And when you can't read anymore… write.
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We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.
Much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious.
All that is important in this moment is movement. Make the movement vital and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.
When civil fury first grew high, and men fell out they knew not why.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.
Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it. All that is not a true change will disappear in the future society.
The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
To change your mind and to follow him who sets you straight is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.
I shall work for the Republican party and call on all women to join me, precisely…for what that party has done and promises to do for women, nothing more, nothing less.
What is a man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, everything in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.
Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.
If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other persons point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.
The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and . . . each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.
The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.
I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.