# Quote — James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

> People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

- Author: [James Baldwin](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin.md)
- Book: [No Name in the Street](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin/no-name-in-the-street.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Baldwin#No_Name_in_the_Street_(1972)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin/no-name-in-the-street/people-who-treat

## More from this book

> People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin/no-name-in-the-street/people-pay-for.md)

> There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin/no-name-in-the-street/there-is-a-reason.md)

> The prison is overcrowded, the calendars full, the judges busy, the lawyers ambitious, and the cops zealous. What does it matter if someone gets trapped here for a year or two, gets ruined here, goes mad here, commits murder or suicide here? It's too bad, but that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. I do not claim that everyone in prison here is innocent, but I do claim that the law, as it operates, is guilty, and that the prisoners, therefore, are all unjustly imprisoned. Is it conceivable, after all, that any middle-class white boy — or, indeed, almost any white boy — would have been arrested on so grave a charge as murder, with such flimsy substantiation, and forced to spend, as of this writing, three years in prison? What force, precisely, is operating when a prisoner is advised, requested, ordered, intimidated, or forced, to confess to a crime he has not committed, and promised a lighter sentence for so perjuring and debasing himself? Does the law exist for the purpose of furthering the ambitions of those who have sworn to uphold the law, or is it seriously to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin/no-name-in-the-street/the-prison-is-overcrowded.md)