Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.
I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too.
The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.
We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.
Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.
I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.
The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer.
North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.
I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.
I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.
If you want to feel humor too exquisite and subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers.
Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us.
In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.
There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even peace.
Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done.
The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.
The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.
We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of the white oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.
The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.
Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
We cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world is reason, if this ever becomes a reasonable world.
The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.
I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.
If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?
The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.
Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.
Half the Christian churches of New York are trying to ruin the free public schools in order to replace them by religious dogma.
The true college will ever have but one goal - not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.
There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.
Harriet Tubman fought American slavery single handed and was a pioneer in that organized effort known as the Underground Railroad.
My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.
There may often be excuse for doing things poorly in this world, but there is never any excuse for calling a poorly done thing, well done.
But what of black women?... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.
The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, 'What else are women for?
If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they have not often let their presence be known.
The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.
A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.
For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.
The most ordinary Negro is a distinct gentleman, but it takes extraordinary training and opportunity to make the average white man anything but a hog.
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.
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.
At best, the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger.
In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment.
The Negro was freed and turned loose as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. Ninety-nine per cent were field hands and servants of the lowest class.
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.
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.
What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!
Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.