J.F. Baldwin Quotes

Americans are not saving enough for retirement.

(Antique clocks) need servicing just like your automobile or anything else. They're mechanical, and about every 10 years you should have them cleaned. That's the way they last forever.

SUNY gives you a world-class education.

I always equate wrestling to having been in the Marine Corps.

I was an activist long before I even entertained the possibility of being an actor.

When I wrestled in College, my team was very good.

You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

Ain't no such thing as a little fault or a big fault. Satan get his foot in the door, he ain't going to rest till he's in the room. You is in the Word or you ain't--ain't no halfway with God.

...all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me...

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.

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. (p. 81)

Sin is the only heritage of the natural man...

I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.

We live in a nation of pigs and murderers.

...they ain't never met nobody they didn't lie to and steal from.

If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.

I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.

We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them.

Experience which destroys innocence also leads one back to it.

This world is white no longer and it will never be white again.

It is a great shock at the age of 5 or 6 to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

We take our shape it is true within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Whose little boy are you?

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

The question is not, who uses faith and who uses reason? Everyone uses both. The question instead should be, who has the most reasonable faith?

New knowledge enhances an ever increasing sense of our own ignorance. The more we know, the more we know we don't know. Feynman called it 'the expanding frontier of ignorance'.

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Once you've found some joy, you never want to be without it.

there was nothing to be ashamed of in doing jobs simply to make a living, so long as those jobs fueled other creative efforts

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.

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.

The idea being that if I was so incredibly small, then I could do almost anything, because what impact would I have, really? What damage could be done, being so puny in the big scheme?

It is imperative that we replace those who think they own this country, with those who built it.

Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox.

There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.

This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white.

The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

This was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality…

I realized then that all of the problems in my life that I thought were unsolvable were in fact solvable—except for having just jumped.

The real troubles with living is that living is so banal.

It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.