Love & Passion Quote by James A. Baldwin

Baldwin lands the line like a cold punchline, borrowing the bluntest possible human appetite to expose how poverty colonizes the mind. By pairing money with sex, he refuses the polite fiction that financial lack is merely an inconvenience. It is obsession, distraction, a physiological hum that drowns out higher talk about “values” or “potential.” The genius is in the sentence’s turn: deprivation produces fixation, but possession produces amnesia. If you have it, you get the privilege of thinking about “other things” and calling those things character, morality, or even art.

The subtext is a critique of the moralizing gaze aimed at the poor. Baldwin suggests that what looks like greed or single-mindedness is often just the cognitive tax of scarcity. He also needles the comfortable for mistaking their freedom from obsession as spiritual superiority. They’re not less materialistic; they’re simply less haunted.

Context matters because Baldwin is never only talking about cash. In mid-century America, money is inseparable from race, power, and access: who gets to feel secure, who gets to be experimental, who gets to fail safely. The sex comparison adds another layer: desire shaped by absence, the way shame and longing can warp intimacy. Baldwin’s wit is doing ethical work. He collapses the distance between bodily need and economic need so the reader can’t hide behind abstraction. The line insists: if you want to understand people, start with what they’re denied, and notice how quickly your own nobler thoughts arrive once the bills are paid.