James A. Baldwin
James A. Baldwin
James A. "Jim" Baldwinwas an American football player, track athlete, coach of football, basketball, and baseball, and college athletics administrator. He served as the head football coach at Rhode Island State College—now the University of Rhode Island, the University of Maine, Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina—now Duke University, Lehigh University, and Wake Forest University, compiling a career college football record of 41–32–14. Baldwin was also the head basketball coach at the same five schools, amassing a career college basketball...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth2 August 1924
CountryUnited States of America
The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.
Words like 'freedom', 'justice' and '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.
Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.
The miracle is that some have stepped out of the rags of the Republic's definition to assume the great burden and glory of their humanity and their responsibility for one another. It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it leaving the jailkeeper in the rubble.
And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.
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.
The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. 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.
People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.