James Baldwin Quotes

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Think about what there is to learn from your heritage, good and bad, and about what you want to cultivate and not cultivate.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it.

An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.

History is not everything, but it is the starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

… history does not belong to us but rather we to it

I think that anyone who denies their heritage doesn't deserve their destiny. My grandmother was a maid. She put nine children - eight of them - through college; I did not finish college.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

I've been given the opportunity to carry forward the legacy with which people associate me; I can't escape it even if I don't like it. I take pride in carrying forward what's been given to me.

I've got a lot of people I'm carrying on my back, but it's a light load because I take a lot of pride in who I am and where I came from.

I was always pretty interested in my history. Not just the history of the Caribbean, the history of my people, but all walks of life.

The most important thing in life is to know where you come from, and I know where I come from.

I feel I have a responsibility to carry out the immigrant story, since it's one that I hold very dear to my heart, since my story is similar in a lot of ways.

It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.

To deny this is to deny our own heritage, our own spirit, and our own souls.

[James] Baldwin explained that you have your own history, and that you cannot be responsible, for example, for slavery.

You cannot escape where you come from, September. Some part of it remains inside you always, like the slender white heart in the center of the thickest onion.

If you know your history, then you would know where you coming from, then you wouldn't have to ask me, who the heck do I think I am.

I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.

Perception, after all, is not simply a matter of what you believe about yourself, it all encompasses what others think about you, and what has been thought of you historically. I say we can pay attention to those other dimensions of our identity - class, gender, sexual orientation, geographical region - while at the same time understanding how our historically produced racial identity continues to serve, or undercut us.

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.

I do feel very American. I think it's something I'm proud of and proud to be by chance born here. Honestly, that's something I think about.

Nobody can make you angry without your consent, nobody can disappoint you without your consent, you have to give people consent to do these things.