“So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers.”

But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell:the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears; the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls.

The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.

Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.

Education must not simply teach work-it must teach life.

There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.

Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.

Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.

For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.

I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.

Whether you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down… Education must not simply teach work – it must teach life.

I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life, that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.

The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?

A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself.

Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us.

The favorite device of the devil, ancient and modern, is to force a human being into a more or less artificial class, accuse the class of unnamed and unnameable sin, and then damn any individual in the alleged class, however innocent he may be.