James Baldwin's most powerful quotes (with their source)
The top 3 according to 38 votes from people: Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. · There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness. · Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.. (Updated Feb 28, 2022.)
"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.
Top 16
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1
Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
"As Much Truth As One Can Bear", The New York Times Book Review, 14 January 1962.
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2
There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
Sonny's Blues (1957).
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3
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
"Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem", Esquire (July 1960).
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4
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
"Stranger in the Village", Notes of a Native Son (1955).
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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.
"In Search of a Majority", address at Kalamazoo College (February 1960).
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6
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Nobody Knows My Name (1961).
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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.
"The Creative Process", Creative America (1962).
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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.
"Notes of a Native Son", Harper's (November 1955).
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9
Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
Giovanni's Room (1956), part 1, ch. 1.
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10
Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
Giovanni's Room (1956), part 1, ch. 1.
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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.
A Rap on Race, with Margaret Mead (1971), p. 95.
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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.
"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Nobody Knows My Name (1961).
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13
Despair is a sin. I believe that. … there are people who have proved to me that we can be better than we are.
Interview with M. S. Handler, The New York Times (June 1964).
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14
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
"The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman", Esquire (April 1960).
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15
If you don't know what happened behind you, you've no idea of what is happening around you.
"An Interview with James Baldwin" (1961).
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16
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
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.
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