“The cause of war is preparation for war.”

It is the stars, it is the ancient stars, it is the young and everlasting stars!

Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem?

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.

Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground.

Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future world will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it.

Men must not only know, they must act.

All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.

No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.

I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.

The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin–the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world.

Ignorance is a cure for nothing.

Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.

The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.

A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.