James Baldwin’s nonfiction book ‘The Fire Next Time’ was released in 1963.
It includes two essays: ‘My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation’ and ‘Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind’.
The book looks at racial injustice in America and its effects.
We have curated 35 most inspiring quotes from The Fire Next Time book.
Table of Contents
The Fire Next Time Quotes by James Baldwin
“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“People find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
Related Book Quotes: Speak Quotes by Laurie Halse Anderson and The Deal Quotes by Elle Kennedy.
Best The Fire Next Time Quotes
“It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other.” ~ James Baldwin (The 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 wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself – that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
Famous The Fire Next Time Quotes by James Baldwin
“If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it bring must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“Take no one’s word for anything, including mine – but trust your experience.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“Whoever debases others is debasing himself.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded—at least, in the same way.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
Quotes from The Fire Next Time
“The impossible is the least that one can demand.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
Top The Fire Next Time Quotes
“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality – for this touchstone can be only oneself.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” ~ James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
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