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
The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.
If the word integration means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it
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.
God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
I can't be a pessimist, because I am alive.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.
Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?" "Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel." "And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?
There is a 'sanctity' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.