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Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

— James Baldwin

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More quotes by James Baldwin

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.

Notes of a Native Son (1955)

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

Giovanni's Room (1956)

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Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident.

Robert F. Kennedy

He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

Samuel Johnson The Idler (1758)

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. (Weil die Dinge sind, wie sie sind, werden die Dinge nicht so bleiben wie sie sind.)

Bertolt Brecht Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1976)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: James Baldwin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.