A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.
James A. BaldwinFreedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
James A. BaldwinWhen human rights are abused on a grand scale, the broth of purity boils and feeds the rebellion of a new order.
James A. BaldwinIf one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.
James A. BaldwinNobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
James A. BaldwinWhoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.
James A. Baldwin