Quotes by James A. Baldwin

"People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead."

"The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love."

"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."

"Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours."

"People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned."

"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."

"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."

"There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now."

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."

"Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it."

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

"No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time."

"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose."

"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread."

"If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons."

"The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever."

"The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions."

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

"I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative."

"Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did."