Every race and every nation should be judged by the best it has been able to produce, not by the worst.

My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that after all I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage

Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.

You are young, gifted, and Black. We must begin to tell our young, There's a world waiting for you, Yours is the quest that's just begun.

It is strange how in some things honest people can be dishonest without the slightest compunction.

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

It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.