# Quote — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

> It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.

- 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/it-will-be-a-great

## 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)