The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.
~ James Baldwin - [Sex]

The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden -- as an unpatriotic act -- that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.
~ James Baldwin - [Sexuality]

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
~ James Baldwin - [Society]

The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.
~ James Baldwin - [Students]

The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
~ James Baldwin - [Teams and Teamwork]

A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.
~ James Baldwin - [Truth]

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.
~ James Baldwin - [Truth]

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.
~ James Baldwin - [Vocation]

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
~ James Baldwin - [Persecution]

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
~ James Baldwin - [Pessimism]

He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.
~ James Baldwin - [Police]

Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
~ James Baldwin - [Poverty and The Poor]

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
~ James Baldwin - [Power]

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
~ James Baldwin - [Prediction]

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
~ James Baldwin - [Present]

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
~ James Baldwin - [Purity]

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
~ James Baldwin - [Quotations]

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.
~ James Baldwin - [Minorities]

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.
~ James Baldwin - [Money]

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
~ James Baldwin - [Multiculturalism]