“Those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.”

“Character is power.”

“You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you have to overcome to reach your goals.”

“The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.”

“I knew that, in a large degree, we were trying an experiment--that of testing whether or not it was possible for Negroes to build up and control the affairs of a large education institution. I knew...”

“In my contact with people, I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way...”

“But work used to be the lot of every man, and now it is rapidly becoming an aristocratic privilege. Men nowadays are more often paid not to work.”

“When you grow up knowing that you deserve to be on top, that the lesser houses exist to serve your houses glorious destiny, you take such things for granted. Youre born assuming that someone else i...”

“With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a with youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which...”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”

“Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it al...”

“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”