James A. Baldwin
James A. Baldwin
James A. "Jim" Baldwinwas an American football player, track athlete, coach of football, basketball, and baseball, and college athletics administrator. He served as the head football coach at Rhode Island State College—now the University of Rhode Island, the University of Maine, Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina—now Duke University, Lehigh University, and Wake Forest University, compiling a career college football record of 41–32–14. Baldwin was also the head basketball coach at the same five schools, amassing a career college basketball...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth2 August 1924
CountryUnited States of America
There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.
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.
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.