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

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.

Holding a grudge does not hurt the person against whom the grudge is held, it hurts the one who holds it.

Whenever your life touches mine, you make me stronger of weaker… there is no escape… people drag others or lift others up.

You go to school, you study about the Germans and the French, but not about your own race. I hope the time will come when you study black history too.

Political activity alone cannot make a man free. Back of the ballot, he must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence, and character.

No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.

The longer I live and the more I study the question, the more I am convinced that it is not so much the problem of what you will do with Negro, as what the Negro will do with you and your ‘civilization’.

Be respected as being new, and probably a decent change or a help for the human race or whatever, instead of keep carrying the same old burdens around with you.

I’m going to work so that it’s a pure guts race at the end, and if it is, I am the only one who can win it.

My sons and their wives landed on Mars to start another race.

I discovered that success has very little to do with education or race or disposition; it has more to do with principles and following those principles.

I always felt like the rug could be pulled out from under me at anytime. And coming from a racially mixed background, I always felt like I didn’t really fit in anywhere.

Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river that had come down to earth so that its waters might flow over the ashes of those long dead, and that would continue to flow long after the human race had, through hatred and knowledge, burned itself out.

Education, in the broadest of truest sense, will make an individual seek to help all people, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of condition.

So valuable to heaven is the dignity of the human soul that every member of the human race has a guardian angel from the moment the person begins to be.