You degrade us and then ask why we are degraded. You shut our mouths and ask why we don't speak. You close your colleges and seminaries against us and then ask why we don't know.

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.

Bak stood a moment, as though considering whether the sum total of their shared working life was ending in a minus or a plus.

Don't raise me up, I am but a messenger.

Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.

Pay attention! At all moments of the day you are either leading or being led.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

There are two things that I know for certain guys are good for: pushing swings and killing insects.

No teacher has ever been better prepared to teach a lesson.

Lyricists play with words.

When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.

You know a shooter when you see it. At least the creative people do. If a picture isn't obvious in the first draft you're kind of screwed.