“Remember that everyone’s life is measured by the power that individual has to make the world better-this is all life is.”

Decide to be your best. In the long run the world is going to want and have the best and that might as well be you.

A race, like an individual, lifts itself up by lifting others up.

We must reinforce argument with results.

Great men cultivate love and only little men cherish a spirit of hatred; assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what the man or woman is able to do that counts.

I pity from the bottom of my heart any individual who is so unfortunate as to get into the habit of holding race prejudice, for nothing else makes one so blind and narrow.

I think I have learned, in some degree at least, to disregard the old maxim “”Do not get others to do what you can do yourself.”” My motto on the other hand is; “”Do not do that which others can do as well.

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.

I [prefer] a short life with width to a narrow one with length.

If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn’t as good as a white child.

I got a lot of paradoxes in my life. I guess I’m a real confused person, but there are some focused parts to my life now, and I’m slowly trying to put all the pieces back together.

Our true mentor in life is science.

You don’t appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things like being spanked every day by a middle-aged woman: Stuff you pay good money for in later life.

One hour of love has a whole life in it.

In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.