“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

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.

Let your daughter have first of all the book of Psalms for holiness of heart, and be instructed in the Proverbs of Solomon for her godly life.

My philosophy is that I’m an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.

Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring… ‘How to Build a Boat.’

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.

I really wanted to write a book [99: Stories of the Game] on the tradition and history of the league, where kids can pick it up and read it and learn things and say, “Geez, I didn’t know that. That’s pretty cool.”

I am a beau in nothing but my books.

The experience of writing ‘The Kite Runner’ is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.