We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
I don't want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.
When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
Bring on your tear gas, bring on your grenades, your new supplies of Mace, your state troopers and even your national guards. But let the record show we ain't going to be turned around.
Go to work! Go to work in the morn of a new creation. . . until you have. . . reached the height of self-progress, and from that pinnacle bestow upon the world a civilization of your own.
An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.
I almost never do anything for Black History Month, because I feel it's just another way to separate us.
One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
Our goal was not freedom. Freedom was the necessary prerequisite to get to equality.
In all things social we can be as seperate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
I came back to Louisville after the Olympics with my shiny gold medal. Went into a luncheonette where black folks couldn't eat. Thought I'd put them on the spot. I sat down and asked for a meal. The Olympic champion wearing his gold medal. They said, "We don't serve niggers here. " I said, "That's okay, I don't eat 'em. " But they put me out in the street. So I went down to the river, the Ohio River, and threw my gold medal in it.
The problem with hatred and violence is that they intensity the fears of the white majority, and leave them less ashamed of their prejudices toward Negroes.
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced,. . . neither persons nor property will be safe.
I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of increasing my contentment; it only increased my desire to be free, and set me thinking of plans to gain my freedom.
When you have a large amount of the workforce being laid off, some of them have no other choice but to go out there and invent something.
I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person.
Never before has the seductive market way of life held such sway in nearly every sphere of American life. This marketing way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience. . . centered primarily around bodily pleasures and status rankings. . . . The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism and rapacious hedonism in quest of a perennial "high" in body and mind.
You really can change the world if you care enough.