Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.

We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell.

But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.

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

To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.

No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.