James Baldwin Quotes

James Baldwin was an African-American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Baldwin is perhaps best known for Go Tell it on the Mountain. Here are a few quotes from James Baldwin.

• "All of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee."
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "Artists are here to disturb the peace."
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. "
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give."
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "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."
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go."
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time."
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time."
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "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."
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
  - James Baldwin
  
  
• "The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in."
  - James Baldwin