A slave is someone who sits down, and waits for someone to free them.

What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.

Everybody has asked the question, ... 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! You're doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, ... let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also.

[...] endless action and reaction. Those beautifully rounded pebbles which you gather on the sand and which you hold in your hand and marvel at their exceeding smoothness, were chiseled into their varies and graceful forms by the ceaseless action of countless waves. Nature is herself a great worker and never tolerates, without certain rebuke, any contradiction to her wise example. Inaction is followed by stagnation. Stagnation is followed by pestilence and pestilence is followed by death.

If I have advocated the cause of the Negro, it is not because I am a Negro, but because I am a man.

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

The mind does not take its complexion from the skin.