It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges.

Let us keep before us the fact that, almost without exception, every race or nation that has ever got upon its feet has done so through struggle and trial and persecution; and that out of this very resistance to wrong, out of the struggle against odds, they have gained strength, self-confidence, and experience which they could not have gained in any other way.

Every person who has grown to any degree of usefulness, every person who has grown to distinction, almost without exception has been a person who has risen by overcoming obstacles, by removing difficulties, by resolving that when he met discouragement he would not give up.

Start where you are with what you have, knowing that what you have is plenty enough.

Dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top.

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 to permit them to come into contact with other souls – with the great outside world.

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.