Booker T. Washington

“There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.”

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”

“Dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top.”

“I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.”

“No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.”

“No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts.”

“The world should not pass judgement upon the Negro, and especially the Negro youth, too quickly or too harshly. The Negro boy has obstacles, discouragements and temptations to battle with that are little known to those not situated as he is.”

“The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.”

“At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.”

“The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.”

“You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you have to overcome to reach your goals.”

“We all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and selfishness.”

“Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.”

“One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.”

“Character, not circumstances, makes the man.”