James Baldwin

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. ↗

— James Baldwin

#imagination

We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible. ↗

— James Baldwin

#education

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be ↗

— James Baldwin

#liberty #freedom

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. ↗

— James Baldwin

#love

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. ↗

— James Baldwin

#expression #james-baldwin #nausea #survival #vomit

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. ↗

— James Baldwin

#patriotism #protest #love

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. ↗

— James Baldwin

#attachment #belonging #comfort #completion #fulfillment

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go. ↗

— James Baldwin

#inspirational

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. ↗

— James Baldwin

#freedom-of-thought #education

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain. ↗

— James Baldwin

#nature