“Fear is a self-imposed prison that will keep you from becoming what God intends for you to be.”

“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.”

“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.”

“A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.”

“Stop being tomented by everyone else's reaction to you.”

“Free your life from the fangs of gossips by not associating yourself with them. Anyone who helps you to gossip about someone can also help someone to gossip about you.”

“I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.”

“If you are interested in success, it’s easy to set your standards in terms of other people’s accomplishments and then let other people measure you by those standards. But the standards you set for yourself are always more important. They should be higher than the standards anyone else would set for you, because in the end you have to live with yourself, and judge yourself, and feel good about yourself. And the best way to do that is to live up to your highest potential. So set your standards high and keep them high, even if you think no one else is looking. Somebody out there will always notice, even if it’s just you.”

“I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.”

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

“God made you as you are on purpose. He gave you your looks, your height, your skin color, your nose, your personality. Nothing about you is by accident. You didn’t get overlooked. You didn’t get left out. God calls you His masterpiece. Instead of going around feeling down on yourself, unattractive, too tall, too short, not enough of this, or too much of that, dare to get up in the morning and say, “I am a masterpiece. I am created in the image of Almighty God.”

“I love Humanity but I hate humans”

“The Word does not change. The Dead Sea scrolls, archeology, modern science—they do not change the Bible; they confirm it.”

“In the face of our common dangers, in this wintr of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”