# Quote — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

> If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

- Author: [James Baldwin](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin.md)
- Book: [The Fire Next Time](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin/the-fire-next-time.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Baldwin#The_Fire_Next_Time_(1963)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin/the-fire-next-time/if-the-word

## More from this book

> Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin/the-fire-next-time/perhaps-the-whole.md)

> Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty — necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin/the-fire-next-time/christianity-has-operated.md)

> Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-baldwin/the-fire-next-time/whatever-white-people.md)