There is no labor a person does that is undignified; if they do it right.

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

Nothing I've ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

I wasn't always black... there was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger.

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

It isn't a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is white is not all that's beautiful.

The main goal of the future is to stop violence. The world is addicted to it.

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

The greatest gift you can give yourself is kindness.

A character is as much about what you do as what you say.

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

I did a lot of good work for the rest of the forty years... science is an incremental thing. Everything builds on everything else, it's a pattern, it's a mosaic.

The people of Iowa are a rare breed.

When folks git ole en strucken wid de palsy, dey mus' speck ter be laff'd at.

Anne Romaine [ is ]folk singer and a skillful historian, even though she was not formally trained in the field [of Malcolm X].

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

Any society that values wealth above freedom will lose its freedom, and will ultimately lose its wealth as well