She was my first love, and I loved her as only a boy loves.

The colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.

Americans are immensely popular in Paris; and this is not due solely to the fact that they spend lots of money there, for they spend just as much or more in London, and in the latter city they are merely tolerated because they do spend.

And God stepped out on space, and He looked around and said: I'm lonely - I'll make me a world.

There are a great many colored people who are ashamed of the cake-walk, but I think they ought to be proud of it.

But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.

A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive.