“The opposite of compromise is character.”

Opportunity is important but exertion is indispensable.

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.

A smile or a tear has no nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man.

Poverty, ignorance and degradation are the combined evils, these constitute the social disease of the free colored people of the US.

Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document!

Neither we, nor any other people, will ever be respected till we respect ourselves and we will never respect ourselves till we have the means to live respectfully.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

A man is worked on by what he works on.

There is no negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution.

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

Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.

The man who will get up will be helped up; and the man who will not get up will be allowed to stay down.

The destiny of the colored American is the destiny of America.

What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.

I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.

I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

I don’t judge my characters, and that’s my job not to judge them. It’s my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.

If I’m doing my job right, then I’m not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I’m just jotting it down.

Particularly as a writer, it is my job to ignore social critics, or the response that social critics might have when it comes to the opinions of my characters, the way they talk, or anything that can happen to them.

It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.

I remember one time that I was filming a scene in which my character rides through Troy on a chariot. I just looked around at this incredible set thinking ‘This is the life’.

The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self – our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.

I was just genuinely shy. I’d always been a shy kid.