James Baldwin Quotes on People (7 Quotes)

Words like freedom, justice, democracy are not common concepts on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are.

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

The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way ... people look at reality, then you can change it.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Most people... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

The secret lies, I think, in his intimate knowledge of the people he is addressing be they black or white, and in the forthrightness with which he speaks of those things which hurt and baffle them. . . . He allows them their self-respect. . .