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
James A. Baldwin quotes about
Hatred destroys the person who hates.
Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.
But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.
You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other-male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.
Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.