James Baldwin quotes about justice & the law

If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country.

I suppose they will come for him early in the morning, perhaps just before dawn, so that the last thing Giovanni will ever see will be that grey, lightless sky over Paris, beneath which we stumbled homeward together so many desperate and drunken mornings.

Why was too black for the newsprint to carry and too deep for Giovanni to tell.

I don’t know when and I don’t know how, but I know you going to be brought low one of these days. I ain’t holy like you are, but I know right from wrong.

The truth of a case doesn’t matter. What matters is – who wins.

Time could not be bought. The only coin time accepted was life.

I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.

But they are wrong to be ashamed. The people responsible for these jails should be ashamed.

It is not that he gives up hope, but that he ceases clinging to it.

The poor are always crossing the Sahara. And the lawyers and bonds-men and all that crowd circle around the poor, exactly like vultures.

Maybe I’d feel different if I had done something and got caught. But I didn’t do nothing. They were just playing with me, man, because they could.

Remember, Tish, after all, it isn’t very much of a case. If Fonny were white, it wouldn’t be a case at all.

These captive men are the hidden price for a hidden and dreadful terror: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

But you don’t know – the worst thing, man, the worst thing – is that they can make you so fucking scared. Scared, man. Scared.

No matter what you may understand, and really understand, and no matter what you may tell yourself, if no one comes to see you, you are in very bad trouble. And trouble, here, means danger.

It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality.

This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real.

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace.

Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

Steps are taken to right the wrong, without, however, expanding or demolishing the ghetto. The idea is to make it less of a social liability, a process about as helpful as make-up to a leper.

In Paris everything is very slow. Also, when dealing with the bureaucracy, the man you are talking to is never the man you have to see.

In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared even more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.

“Our people” have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies’ sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat levelled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.

Moreover, irrespective of personal integrity, his position—neatly and often painfully paradoxical—is utterly dependent on the continuing debasement of fourteen million Negroes; should the national ideals be put into practice tomorrow, countless prominent Negroes would lose their raison d’être.

Later on I concluded that they were not being hypocritical or even trying to comfort us. They meant exactly what they said. It was only that they spoke another language.