As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head

And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.

While most girls run away from home to marry, I ran away to teach.

Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.

Stop using the word 'Negro.' The word is a misnomer from every point of view. It does not represent a country or anything else ... I am an African-American.

It is only through the home that a people can become really good and truly great.

To the lack of incentive to effort, which is the awful shadow under which we live, may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.

Lifting as they climb onward and upward they go struggling and striving and hoping that the buds and blossoms of their desires may burst into glorious fruition ere long.

To the lack of incentive to effort which is the awful shadow under which we live may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.

Christians don't tell lies they just go to church and sing them.

A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.

[Albert Camus] was not an existentialist!

I'd like President Bush to get a gun in his hands. I'll go with him. I can't think of anything better than to die in places just beginning their lives.

The spiritual path is not strewn with roses.

A man with a long history of racial discrimination should never run our government.

If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.

Music is the celestial sound, and it is sound that controls the whole universe, not atomic vibrations. Sound energy, sound power, is much, much greater than any other power in the world.