Great Throughts Treasury

"If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started."

"Radicalism is a label that is always applied to people who are endeavoring to get freedom."

"Hungry men have no respect for law, authority, or human life."

"Intelligence rules the world, ignorance carries the burden."

"The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity."

"A happy but miserable state in which man finds himself from time to time; sometimes he believes he is happy by loving, then suddenly he finds how miserable he is. It is all joy, it sweetens life, but it does not last. It comes and goes, but when it is active, there is no greater virtue, because it makes one supremely happy."

"A form of religion practiced by the millions, but as misunderstood, and unreal to the majority as gravitation is to the untutored savage. We profess to live in the atmosphere of Christianity, yet our acts are as barbarous as if we never knew Christ. He taught us to love, yet we hate; to forgive, yet we revenge; to be merciful, yet we condemn and punish, and still we are Christians. If hell is what we are taught it is, then there will be more Christians there than days in all creation. To be a true Christian one must be like Christ and practice Christianity, not as the Bishop does, but as he says, for if our lives were to be patterned after the other fellow's all of us, Bishop, Priest and Layman would ultimately meet around the furnace of hell, and none of us, because of our sins, would see salvation."

"A man's bread and butter is only insured when he works for it."

"A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact."

"A race without authority and power is a race without respect."

"A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots."

"Action, self-reliance, the vision of self and the future have been the only means by which the oppressed have seen and realized the light of their own freedom."

"Africa for the Africans... at home and abroad!"

"All peoples are struggling to blast a way through the industrial monopoly of races and nations, but the Negro as a whole has failed to grasp its true significance and seems to delight in filling only that place created for him by the white man."

"Be as proud of your race today as our fathers were in days of yore. We have beautiful history, and we shall create another in the future that will astonish the world."

"All of us may not live to see the higher accomplishment of an African Empire so strong and powerful, as to compel the respect of mankind, but we in our life-time can so work and act as to make the dream a possibility within another generation."

"Before we can properly help the people, we have to destroy the old education... that teaches them that somebody is keeping them back and that God has forgotten them and that they can't rise because of their color.. we can only build... with faith in ourselves and with self-reliance, believing in our own possibilities, that we can rise to the highest in God's creation."

"At no time within the last five-hundred years can one point to a single instance of the Negro as a race of haters."

"Any sane man, race or nation that desires freedom must first of all think in terms of blood. Why even the Heavenly Father tells us that "without the shedding of blood there can be no remission of sins." Then how in the name of God, with history before us, do we expect to redeem Africa without preparing ourselves some of us to die."

"Ambition is the desire to go forward and improve one's condition. It is a burning flame that lights up the life of the individual and makes him see himself in another state. To ambitious is to be great in mind and soul. To want that which is worthwhile and strive for it. To go on without looking back, reaching to that which gives satisfaction."

"Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people."

"Before you have a government, you must have the people. Without the people there can be no government. The government must be, therefore, an expression of the will of the people."

"Education is the medium by which a people are prepared for the creation of their own particular civilization, and the advancement and glory of their own race."

"Death is the end of all life in the individual or the thing; if physical, the crumbling of the body into dust from whence it came. He who lives not uprightly, dies completely in the crumbling of the physical body, but he who lives well, transforms himself from that which is mortal, to immortal."

"Every man has a right to his own opinion. Every race has a right to its own action; therefore let no man persuade you against your will, let no other race influence you against your own."

"For over three hundred years the white man has been our oppressor, and he naturally is not going to liberate us to the higher freedom the truer liberty the truer Democracy. We have to liberate ourselves."

"Fear is a state of nervousness fit for children and not men. When man fears a creature like himself he offends God, in whose image and likeness he is created. Man being created equal tears not man but God. To fear is to lose control of ones nerves, ones will, to flutter, like a dying fowl, losing consciousness, yes, alive."

"Every student of Political Science, every student of Economics knows, that the race can only be saved through a solid industrial foundation. That the race can only be saved through political independence. Take away industry from a race; take away political freedom from a race, and you have a group of slaves."

"God does not... give people positions or jobs or... good conditions such as they desire; they must do that for themselves.. God does not build cities nor towns nor nations, nor homes, nor factories; men and people do that and all those who want must work for themselves and pray to God to give them strength to do it."

"God Almighty created each and every one of use for a place in the world, and for the least of us to think that we were created only to be what we are and not what we can make ourselves, is to impute an improper motive to the Creator for creating is."

"For us to examine ourselves thoroughly as a people we will find that we have more traitors than leaders, because nearly everyone who essays to lead the race at this time does so by first establishing himself as the pet of some philanthropist of another race, to whom he will go and debase his race in the worst form, humiliate his own manhood, and thereby win the sympathy of the great benefactor?, who will dictate to him what he should do in leadership of the Negro race? These leaders tell us how good Mr. So and So is, how many good friends we have in the opposite race, and that if we leave everything to them all will work out well."

"God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement."

"History is the land-mark by which we are directed into the true course of life."

"History teaches us no race, no people, no nation has ever been freed through cowardice, through cringing, through bowing and scraping, but all that has been achieved to the glory of mankind, to the glory and honor of races and nations was through the manly determination and effort of those who lead and those who are led."

"How dare anyone tell us that Africa cannot be redeemed, when we have 400,000,000 men and women with warm blood coursing through their veins? The power that holds Africa is not Divine."

"I am not opposed to the white race as charged by my enemies. I have no time to hate any one. All my time is devoted to the up-building and development of the Negro Race."

"I know no national boundary where the Negro is concerned. The whole world is my province until Africa is free."

"I like honesty and fair play."

"I have no desire to take all black people back to Africa; there are blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there."

"I read ?Up From Slavery? and then my dream -- if I may so call it -- of being a race leader dawned."

"If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it."

"I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together."

"It is only the belief and the confidence we have in a God why man is able to understand his own social institutions, and move and live like a rational human being."

"If the white man has the idea of a white God, let him worship his God as he desires. If the yellow man's God is of his race let him worship his God as he sees fit. We, as Negroes, have found a new ideal. Whilst our God has no color, yet it is human to see everything through one's own spectacles, and since the white people have seen their God through white spectacles, we only now started out (late though it be) to see our God through our own spectacles. The God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. We Negroes believe in the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God - God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, the One God of all ages. That is the God in whom we believe, but we shall worship Him through the spectacles of Ethiopia."

"Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people's actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself."

"Lagging behind in the van of civilization will not prove our higher abilities. Being subservient to the will and caprice of progressive races will not prove anything superior in us. Being satisfied to drink of the dregs from the cup of human progress will not demonstrate our fitness as a people to exist alongside of others, but when of our own initiative we strike out to build industries, governments, and ultimately empires, then and only then will we as a race prove to our Creator and to man in general that we are fit to survive and capable of shaping our own destiny."

"Let us prepare today. For the tomorrows in the lives of the nations will be so eventful that Negroes everywhere will be called upon to play their part in the survival of the fittest human group."

"Let us in shaping our own Destiny set before us the qualities of human JUSTICE, LOVE, CHARITY, MERCY AND EQUITY. Upon such foundation let us build a race, and I feel that the God who is Divine, the Almighty Creator of the world, shall forever bless this race of ours, and who to tell that we shall not teach men the way to life, liberty and true human happiness?"

"Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men."

"LIFE is that existence that is given to man to live for a purpose, to live to his own satisfaction and pleasure, providing he forgets not the God who created him and who expects a spiritual obedience and observation of the moral laws that He has inspired."