James Baldwin

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

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

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.

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

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

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

The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.