Fire Next Time Quotes

“And when I sat at Elijah's table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God's-or Allah's-vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, 'What will happen to all that beauty then?”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“The country should be proud of them, too, but alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played-and play-in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“I am far from convinced that being released from the African with doctor was worthwhile if I am now-in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life-expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“…the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“I felt very close to him, and really wished to be able to love and honor him as a witness, an ally, and a father. I felt that I knew something of his pain and his fury, and, yes, even his beauty. Yet precisely because of the reality and the nature of those streets-because of what he conceived as his responsibility and what I took to be mine-we would always be strangers, and possibly, one day, enemies.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“Elijah and I shook hands, and he asked me where I was going. Wherever it was, I would be driven there-'because, when we invite someone here,' he said, 'we take the responsibility of protecting him from the white devils until he gets wherever it is he’s going.' I was, in fact, going to have a drink with several white devils on the other side of town.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“In a way, I owe the invitation to the incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtuseness of white liberals.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“A few years ago, I would have hated these people with all my heart. Now I pitied them, pitied them in order not to despise them. And this is not the happiest way to feel toward one’s countrymen.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicket people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know they could act that way.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it.”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

“…I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them…”
― James Baldwin, Fire Next Time