James Baldwin

"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."

"But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power."

"Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black."

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

"Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?"

"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."

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

"The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated."

"The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone."

"The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others."

"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."

"The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly."

"The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide."

"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."