you can't beat me and my prayers!

It seems like the first law of Nature is that everybody likes to receive things, but nobody likes to feel grateful.

Ethical and cultural desegregation. It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association.

I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. . . I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.

You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence.

I maintain that I have been a Negro three times--a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!

That is the way with people ... If they do you wrong, they invent a bad name for you, a good name for their acts and then destroy you in the name of virtue.