Men must not only know, they must act.
Life has its pains and evils-its bitter disappointments; but like a good novel and in healthful length of days, there is infinite joy in seeing the World, the most interesting of continued stories, unfold...
One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.
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.
The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
I believe that all men, black, brown, and white, are brothers.
The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?
The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this – with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need – this life is hell.
The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin – the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world.
A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
Ignorance is a cure for nothing.
For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.
In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.
I believe that all men, black and brown, and white, are brothers, varying, through Time and Opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibility of infinite development.
The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.
The favorite device of the devil, ancient and modern, is to force a human being into a more or less artificial class, accuse the class of unnamed and unnameable sin, and then damn any individual in the alleged class, however innocent he may be.
Liberty trains for liberty.
It is as though nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.
Half the Christian churches of New York are trying to ruin the free public schools in order to replace them by religious dogma.