Nobody Knows My Name

by James Baldwin

On the contrary, we have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately).

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor;

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.

(We do not trust educated people and rarely, alas, produce them, for we do not trust the independence of mind which alone makes a genuine education possible.)

In sum, the North, by freeing the slaves of their masters, robbed the masters of any possibility of freeing themselves of the slaves.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.

In a way, status became a kind of substitute for identity, and because money and the things money can buy is the universally accepted symbol here of status, we are often condemned as materialists.

First of all it assumes, if I may say so, that I want to marry your sister

The one thing that all Americans have in common is that they have no other identity apart from the identity which is being achieved on this continent.

that the majority for which everyone is seeking which must reassess and release us from our past and deal with the present and create standards worthy of what a man may be—this majority is you. No one else can do it. The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

But this past is not special to the Negro. This horror is also the past, and the everlasting potential, or temptation, of the human race. If we do not know this, it seems to me, we know nothing about ourselves, nothing about each other; to have accepted this is also to have found a source of strength—source of all our power. But one must first accept this paradox, with joy.

Richard paid the price such an illusion of safety demands. The price is a turning away from, an ignorance of, all of the powers of darkness.

He will face in your life only what he is willing to face in his.

money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did;

The people who are in one’s life or merely continually in one’s presence reveal a great deal about one’s needs and terrors. Also, one’s hopes.