# James Baldwin's most powerful quotes (with their source)

"Not everything that is faced can be changed", the price of being poor and the people trapped in history: the lines of James Baldwin most quoted today, from Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni's Room and The Fire Next Time to his essays and interviews, each with its source.

- 38 votes · 16 items
- Feb 28, 2022 · Grace Morris
- https://even.best/en/l/5083/james-baldwin-s-most-powerful-quotes-with-their-source

## Top 16

1. **Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.** (4 · ▲4 ▼0) — "As Much Truth As One Can Bear", The New York Times Book Review, 14 January 1962.
2. **There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.** (3 · ▲4 ▼1) — Sonny's Blues (1957).
3. **Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem", Esquire (July 1960).
4. **People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — "Stranger in the Village", Notes of a Native Son (1955).
5. **Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — "In Search of a Majority", address at Kalamazoo College (February 1960).
6. **Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Nobody Knows My Name (1961).
7. **The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — "The Creative Process", Creative America (1962).
8. **…one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — "Notes of a Native Son", Harper's (November 1955).
9. **Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Giovanni's Room (1956), part 1, ch. 1.
10. **Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Giovanni's Room (1956), part 1, ch. 1.
11. **You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.** (1 · ▲2 ▼1) — A Rap on Race, with Margaret Mead (1971), p. 95.
12. **Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Nobody Knows My Name (1961).
13. **Despair is a sin. I believe that. … there are people who have proved to me that we can be better than we are.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Interview with M. S. Handler, The New York Times (June 1964).
14. **All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — "The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman", Esquire (April 1960).
15. **If you don't know what happened behind you, you've no idea of what is happening around you.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — "An Interview with James Baldwin" (1961).
16. **Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.** (-2 · ▲0 ▼2) — The Fire Next Time (1963).

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.