It is as though nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.
If the unemployed could eat plans and promises, they would be able to spend the winter on the Riviera.
How shall Integrity face Oppression?
We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of the white oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.
Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stands up and protests. The protest need not be merely physical-the throwing of stones and bullets-if it is mental, spiritual; if it expresses itself in silent, persistent dissatisfaction, the cost to the oppressor is terrific.
I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.
In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and faith. All words and all thinking lead to the child, – to that vast immortality and wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child represents.
The true college will ever have but one goal – not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.
At best, the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger.
The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.
I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.
The music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.
Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly “forgot it” and named their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet.
I believe that there are human stocks with whom it is physically unwise to intermarry, but to think that these stocks are all colored or that there are no such white stocks is unscientific and false.
The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.
The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.
Whiteness is ownership of the earth.
There may often be excuse for doing things poorly in this world, but there is never any excuse for calling a poorly done thing, well done.
It is the stars, it is the ancient stars, it is the young and everlasting stars!
Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born.