“When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, a vision, we ask not how does he look, but what is his message? The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty.”

Would America have been America without her Negro people?

I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.

Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.

I believe that all men, black and brown, and white, are brothers, varying, through Time and Opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibility of infinite development.

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

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.

I think a woman looks best in a sari.

Wonder and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature.

I love dressing up, and I’m aware that people do say that it can take your attention away from the game. But I disagree with this notion!

You must look for the good in people to have more of it appear. As you look only for the good things in a person, you will be amazed at what your new focus reveals.

She had perfect features, with her eye, nose, lips, and ears the right size and in right places. That is all it takes to make people beautiful, normal body parts – yet why does nature mess it up so many times?

I want to be different. If everyone is wearing black, I want to be wearing red.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.

Bat in hand, helmet on, pads on gloves on, shoes on: I am complete.