James Baldwin quotes about courage

Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.

Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.

And God did not hear the prayers of the fearful, for the hearts of the fearful held no belief. Such prayers could rise no higher that the lips that uttered them.

And he feared to make a vow before Heaven until he had the strength to keep it. And yet he knew that until he made the vow he would never find the strength.

It was he who had told her to weep, when she wept, alone; never to let the world see, never to ask for mercy; if one had to die, to go ahead and die, but never to let oneself be beaten.

I don’t want to sound foolish. But, just remember, love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.

Despair can make one monstrous, but it can also make one noble: and here these children are, in the arena, up for grabs.

Something hardens in him, something changes forever, his tears freeze in his belly. But he has leapt from the promontory of despair. He is fighting for his life.

You got to think about that baby. You got to hold on to that baby, don’t care what else happens or don’t happen. You got to do that. Can’t nobody else do that for you.

He stands, and raises his fist. He smiles, and stands there for a moment, looking me dead in the eye. Something travels from him to me, it is love and courage.

Okay. But that’s our flesh and blood, baby: our flesh and blood. I don’t know how we going to do it. I just know we have to do it.

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.

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.

This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose. You do not need ten such men—one will do.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

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. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.

I was icily determined—more determined, really, than I then knew—never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my “place” in this republic.