In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.
Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together.
None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
Hunger makes a thief of any man.
Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.
To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.
There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream – whatever that dream might be.
The secret of joy in work is contained in one word – excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
Iowans know themselves and what they are doing. They are doing well.
No daughter is ever her mother’s darling. That spot is always reserved for the son.
The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them.
There is, of course, a difference between what one seizes and what one really possesses.
The main barrier between East and West today is that the white man is not willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority.
People don’t care to read what they already think or what any people think – they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think.
Religion was their meat and their excitement, their mental food and their emotional pleasure.
People on the whole are very simple-minded, in whatever country one finds them. They are so simple as to take literally, more often than no, the things their leaders tell them.
What a man does in his own house cannot concern the nation.
Every era of renaissance has come out of new freedoms for peoples. The coming renaissance will be greater than any in human history, for this time all the peoples of the earth will share in it.