“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’.

In proportion as one renders service he becomes great.

From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom. This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery.

No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.

There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.

In the long run, the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or previous history will not keep the world from what it wants.

The time will come when the Negro in the South will be accorded all the political rights which his ability, character, and material possessions entitle him to.

If I have done anything in life worth attention, I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother.

The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.

The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for-and dying for, if need be-is the opportunity of making someone else more happy.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.

I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.

Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.

You attract the predominant thoughts that you’re holding in your awareness.

Face your fears and stop allowing the mind to hold you captive.

As a rule the person found out in a betrayal of love holds, all the same, the superior position of the two. It is the betrayed one who is humiliated.

I place my own hope for the United States in the growth of belief among the unqualified that they are in fact qualified: they can articulate and be responsible and hold power

All you are to me now are words on paper and I will always have a part of you as long as I am holding this pen.

If I hold back, I’m no good. I’m no good. I’d rather be good sometimes, than holding back all the time.