The fire next time quotes

"You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger."

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In this quote, Baldwin offers a lesson to his nephew. He reassures him that, in many ways, his situation is better than that of his ancestors. He has gotten to leave the land and move into urban spaces. Though these do also have their fair share of dangers, Baldwin suggests that survival is now possible. However, Baldwin cautions that a deep, mortal challenge remains: accepting the white world's deep prejudice against black people. While this prejudice is no longer enshrined in law, it still presents a massive obstacle. This, Baldwin says, is what destroyed his nephew's father, Baldwin's brother: internalizing the belief that he was inferior to white men. He internalized this after years of being put down by white Americans. Baldwin points out to his nephew that the white world does still think of African Americans as "niggers," meaning that it continues to put them down and approach them as inferior. Thus, Baldwin warns James that he must not succumb to this belief. It is only by accepting the way white men think of him that he could also be destroyed by despair.

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12 James Baldwin quotes that are still painfully true today

Hailed as a gifted pupil at an early age, James Baldwin discovered a particular passion for writing during his teens. At the age of 13, he wrote his first article, Harlem – Then and Now, for a school magazine. He went on to be one of the most significant writers of American literature, famous for novels including Giovanni's Room (1965) and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974).

Baldwin was also a leading voice in the Civil Rights Movement, known for his insightful work that gave voice to the African American experience and sought to educate white Americans on what it meant to be Black.

In the decades following his death in 1987, the rise of movements like Black Lives Matter and ongoing discourse on race, social inequality and sexuality show that there is still a long way to go on the march to equality – and Baldwin's words are often to be found at the centre of these conversations.

Read on for some of his most prescient, and often still painfully true, musings on literature, race, self-belief, prejudice and more.

“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy

The Fire Next Time Quotes

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
― James Ba