James A. Baldwin World Quotations

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.

There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.

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.

And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.

The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

You don't need numbers; you need passion, and this is proven by the history of the world!

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.

You write in order to change the world.

I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.