Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

Ignorance is a cure for nothing.

The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon Hell and Damnation-upon an attempt to scare people into being decent and threatening them with the terrors of death and punishment. We are still trained to believe a good deal that is simply childish in theology. The outward and visible punishment of every wrong deed that men do the repeated declaration that anything can be gotten by anyone at any time by prayer.

For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.

There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.

I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.