James Baldwin: One Must Negotiate This Passage as Nobly as Possible, For the Sake of Those Who Are Coming After Us

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

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.

Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it. 

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.

White people 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. 

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

 
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

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.

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity. 

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.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

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

Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
  
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. 

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian. 

To accept one’s past — one’s history — is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. 

Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. 

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free. 

Writing is a political instrument. 

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

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death — ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.