From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen.

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

You are not judged by the height you have risen, but from the depth you have climbed.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.

There is no negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution

Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free.

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.

Without a struggle, there can be no progress.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

You have survived so muchthat no one remembers.And you still spread warmrain on all your overgrownlots. And you still get dressedin the morning. You stillopen wide for the sun.

TACKLE the ROOT CAUSE not the EFFECT.

Who cares about great marks left behind? We have one life.... Just one. Our life. We have nothing else.

One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.

Chicks cannot hold their smoke, dat's what it is.

We got to this point by constantly perfecting our products.

It's an addictive thing. It's not so much I like to go win, but it's a rush.

Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations.

The gardens of my youth were fragrant gardens and it is their sweetness rather than their patterns of their furnishings that I now most clearly recall.

I think art should be controversial. I think it should make people think.