And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”“The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. In 1986, together with Leonard Bernstein, Baldwin was a firm believer that social change could take place in the American society. Love is a battle. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.” For themselves, because they've lost their toy.” “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say ‘Yes’ to life.A liberal: someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” Born in 1924, James Baldwin was an American essayist, novelist, playwright and social critic.He became an important voice through writing passionately about racial discrimination, spirituality and humanity.. Baldwin’s writings approach social issues and the psychological pressure affecting African Americans and individuals with different sexual orientations, a then-taboo subject. Check out the best James Baldwin love quotes below: "Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son, explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it … Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.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.Love him and let him love you. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.