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Book: Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays
Quotes of Book: Collected Essays: Notes of a
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  1. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    One would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance… totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength." {Baldwin, 84}
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  2. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    The South very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live, and have lived here, are so ugly that now they cannot even speak to one another. It does not demand much reflection to be appalled at the inevitable state of mind achieved by people who dare not speak freely about those things which most disturb them.
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  3. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master. They had, the masters, incontestably, the rope-in time, with enough, they would hang themselves with it. They were not to hang : I was to see to that.
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  4. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    There is nothing more boring, anyway, than sexual activity as an end in itself, and a great many people who came out of the closet should reconsider.
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  5. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    In the Negro world, as in the white world, Negroes who have money band together and try to ignore the existence of their unluckier brothers. That is the way the love of money works. But neither money, nor the love of it, is the root of all evil. The importance of money is simply that power in the world does not exist without it and power in the world is what almost everyone would like to have.
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  6. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    It is said that {Shakespeare's} time was easier than ours, but I doubt it-no time can be easy if one is living through it.
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  7. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    There seems to be a vast amount of confusion in the Western world concerning these matters, but love and sexual activity are not synonymous: Only by becoming inhuman can the human being pretend that they are. The mare is not obliged to love the stallion, nor is the bull required to love the cow. They are doing what comes naturally.
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  8. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    Life, it is true, is a process of decisions and alternatives, the conscious awareness and acceptance of limitations. Experience, nevertheless, to say nothing of history, seems clearly to indicate that it is not possible to banish or to falsify any human need without ourselves undergoing falsification and loss.
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  9. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    We spend vast amounts of our time an emotional energy in learning how not to be natural and in eluding the trap of our own nature and it therefore becomes very difficult to know exactly what is meant when we speak of the unnatural. It is not possible to have it both ways, to use nature at one time as the final arbiter of human conduct and at another to oppose her as angrily as we do.
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  10. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    A mob cannot afford to doubt: that the Jews killed Christ or that niggers want to rape their sisters or that anyone who fails to make it in the land of the free and the home of the brave deserves to be wretched. But these ideas do not come from the mob. They come from the state, which creates and manipulates the mob. The idea of a black persons as property, for example, does not come from the mob. It is not a spontaneous idea. It does not come from the people, who knew better, who thought nothing of intermarriage until they were penalized for it: this idea comes from the architects of the American State. These architects decided that the concept of Property was more important-more real-than the possibilities of the human being."
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  11. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
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  12. James Baldwin _ Collected Essays: Notes of a

    It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
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