The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “James Baldwin”

James Baldwin on Freedom and How We Imprison Ourselves
James Baldwin on Freedom and How We Imprison Ourselves

“We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.”

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James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni’s Extraordinary Forgotten Conversation About the Language of Love and What It Takes to Be Truly Empowered
James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni’s Extraordinary Forgotten Conversation About the Language of Love and What It Takes to Be Truly Empowered

“If you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else.”

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James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing
James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”

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James Baldwin and Margaret Mead on Religion
James Baldwin and Margaret Mead on Religion

“If any particular discipline … does not become a matter of your personal honor, your private convictions, then it’s simply a cloak which you can wear or throw off.”

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Change the Narrative, Change Your Destiny: How James Baldwin Read His Way from Harlem to the Literary Pantheon
Change the Narrative, Change Your Destiny: How James Baldwin Read His Way from Harlem to the Literary Pantheon

“You’re playing the game according to somebody else’s rules, and you can’t win until you understand the rules and step out of that particular game, which is not, after all, worth playing.”

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James Baldwin on the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity and How It Illuminates the Universal Experience of What It Means to Be Human
James Baldwin on the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity and How It Illuminates the Universal Experience of What It Means to Be Human

“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.”

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James Baldwin on the Revelation That Taught Him How to Truly See
James Baldwin on the Revelation That Taught Him How to Truly See

“He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw.”

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Elevating Resolutions for the New Year Inspired by Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds
Elevating Resolutions for the New Year Inspired by Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds

Cultivate honorable relationships, resist absentminded busyness, tell the world how to treat you, embrace enoughness, and more.

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James Baldwin and Margaret Mead on Reimagining Democracy for a Post-Consumerist Culture
James Baldwin and Margaret Mead on Reimagining Democracy for a Post-Consumerist Culture

“Democracy should not mean the leveling of everyone to the lowest common denominator. It should mean the possibility of everyone being able to raise himself to a certain level of excellence.”

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Margaret Mead and James Baldwin on Identity, Race, the Immigrant Experience, and Why the “Melting Pot” Is a Problematic Metaphor
Margaret Mead and James Baldwin on Identity, Race, the Immigrant Experience, and Why the “Melting Pot” Is a Problematic Metaphor

“You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.”

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