The circumstances that surround a man's life are not important. How that man responds to those circumstances IS IMPORTANT. His response is the ultimate determining factor between success and failure.

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.

Remember that everyone's life is measured by the power that individual has to make the world better-this is all life is.

The wisest among my race understand that agitations of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.

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

The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States of America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.

A life is not worth much of which it cannot be said, when it comes to its close, that it was helpful to humanity.