James Baldwin Quotes

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

If a country forgets where it came from, how will its people know who they are?

I should not have to prove my ethnicity to anyone. I know who I am.

Myself, first of all, I am a Jew. And that is the most important thing for me.

Do not let where you come from define you, but never forget the values you learned from your close community.

The self was a very strange concept to me until I came to America, and my child was born with that entitlement, and that just thrilled me.

A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.

The Italian culture and values have significantly shaped who I am, and I would never intentionally demean or degrade the very culture that has been so integral to my life.

It is important to recognize that folklore is not simply a way of obtaining available date about identity for social scientists; it is actually one of the principal means by which an individual and a group discovers or establishes his or its identity.

I think it is very possible that my deeper character is not very English.

Our deep desires define us, really.

If you forget your history, you forget who you are.

I've got the fighting Irish, and Puerto Ricans are some of the best fighters in the world. I'm proud of who I am, but it doesn't define me as a person.

I would certainly say that my life, and perhaps human life in general, follows an intricate pattern of defining, declaring, struggling for, fighting for what we think of and treasure as the self. The inviolate self. This begins with our families: your parents are part of your cultural landscape, and they are also shaped by larger forces than them.

Now that I'm older, I appreciate my culture and I appreciate Spanish. I feel bad I didn't pick up on it earlier.

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe.

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.

Every decision you make - every decision that you make every second - is not a decision about what to do, it is a decision about who you are. Every act is an act of self-definition.

To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.

But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

Everybody has to know where they're coming from, what they're doing, why they're doing it, who they are. These are essentials.

We black women are the single group in the West intact. And anybody can see we're pretty shaky. We are, however (all praises), the only group that derives its identity from itself.

Identity is something that you are constantly earning.