“If I have advocated the cause of the Negro, it is not because I am a Negro, but because I am a man.”

We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is work.

A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Nature has given woman the same powers, and subjected her to the same earth, breathes the same air, subsists on the same food, physical, moral, mental and spiritual. She has, therefore, an equal right with man, in all efforts to obtain and maintain a perfect existence.

The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery.

The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.

A man’s character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him.

A man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.

Truth is proper and beautiful in all times and in all places.

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

One and God make a majority.

The ballot is the only safety.

A slave is someone who sits down, and waits for someone to free them.

The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle.

I will give Mr. Freeland the credit of being the best master I ever had, till I became my own master.

What the advocates of these tax rates fail to realize is that the greater part of the incomes taxed away would not have been consumed but saved and invested.

The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.

The first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism.

The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.

If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies.

I’ve advocated a proportional tax system. You make $10 billion, you pay a billion. You make $10, you pay one. And everybody gets treated the same way.

Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they’ve spent time in and around the ocean, and they’ve personally seen the beauty.