“In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

A life is not worth much of which it cannot be said, when it comes to its close, that it was helpful to humanity.

All knowledge is valuable to a librarian.

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.

Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn’t meant.

Success always leaves footprints.

Don’t ever let them pull you down so low as to hate them. (also cited as: I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.)

It often requires more courage to suffer in silence than to rebel, more courage not to strike back than to retaliate, more courage to be silent than to speak.

In any country, regardless of what its laws say, wherever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists.

Those who have accomplished the greatest results are those…who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient and polite.

I believe that any man’s life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement, if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day, and as nearly as possible reaching the high-water mark of pure and useful living.

Progress, progress is the law of nature; under God it shall be our eternal guiding star.

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’.

Even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.

I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery.

Character is power.

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.

I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.