“An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction.”

There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.

Men may make laws to hinder and fetter the ballot, but men cannot make laws that will bind or retard the growth of manhood.

Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.

I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

Educated men and women, especially those who are in college, very often get the idea that religion is fit only for the common people. No young man or woman can make a greater error than this.

It means a great deal, I think, to start off on a foundation which one has made for oneself.

The circumstances that surround a man’s life are not important. How that man responds to those circumstances IS IMPORTANT. His response is the ultimate determining factor between success and failure.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.

We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

There is no escape – man drags man down, or man lifts man up.

Never let your work drive you. Master it and keep it in complete control.

An inch of progress is worth more than a yard of complaint.

You may fill your heads with knowledge or skillfully train your hands, but unless it is based upon high, upright character, upon a true heart, it will amount to nothing. You will be no better than the most ignorant.

Success always leaves footprints.

All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

Our love story comes to me in waves, in movie stills and long summer afternoons spent under a sky of incessant blue. I still think of your eyes in flashes of color, your hands in a frenetic, feverish blur-your smile a mosaic of light and shadow. I still find myself lost in those moments of abstraction.

Everything will be all right – you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.