“Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real” James Baldwin
“Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever” James Baldwin 
“The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place” James Baldwin
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time" James Baldwin
“I don’t know what most white people feel. I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions.. I don’t know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to" James Baldwin
