James Baldwin Quotes

This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledge, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority.

So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.

What happens when people open their hearts?"... "They get better.

I want people to leave the theater and think, "How can I be a better person?" That's the only way things are going to improve.

A sense of blessedness comes from a change of heart, not from more blessings.

I think for anything to change, in the real world, people have got to change on the inside and that's what we want to start, to get people to think and do more themselves and get involved in whatever they want to get involved with.

And if I can take part in it by transforming my own consciousness, then someone else's, I'm happy to do it.

Self-reform automatically brings about social reform.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

Allah does not change social conditions until people change their attitude.

The great solution to all human problems is individual inner transformation.

Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are.

"This is why alchemy exists," the boy said. "So that everyone will search for his treasure, find it, and then want to be better than he was in his former life. Lead will play its role until the world has no further need for lead; and then lead will have to turn itself into gold. That's what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too."

What the world need is people who have come alive.

If you want things to change, You have to change. If you want things to be better, You have to be better.

Change in society is of secondary importance; that will come about naturally, inevitably, when you as a human being bring about the change in yourself.

Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas.

Power, as human beings exercise power, to me means the ability to change: the ability to change oneself, the ability to change one's community. And the positive use of power is transformation of self and community toward a higher ideal, toward a healed world.

There are people that say they will do better but they never do better. They have no power in them to do better until they come to Christ.

The transformation of the world is brought about by the transformation of oneself.

From my own experience, there are so many people who believe that the individual can change. The individual doesn't have to be LGBT.

I don't believe in bad people. I believe that people, somewhere inside, have the potential to realize themselves.

You can change all things for the better when you change yourself for the better.

You get to the point where you realize that unless you, yourself, become more of the change, you can't create too much change.

If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only ONE thing: you can become better yourself.