“When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.”

To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.

We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong – this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.

Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.

The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.

The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.

Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away.

But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.

Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.

The music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.

It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disenfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this – with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need – this life is hell.

The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

Begin with art, because art tries to take us outside ourselves. It is a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and context so conversation can flow back and forth and we can be influenced by each other.

The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.

We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of the white oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.

As Negro voting increased, Congress got an improved sense of hearing.

People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book.

I was an imaginative child and learning to read was like unlocking another dimension in my mind.

The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

I like books that aren’t just lovely but that have memories in themselves.

Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.

Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.