“Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”

“Display politeness and frankness always both in action and conversation. Don’t keep engaging in useless arguments. It scares your dreams away. Talk sensibly.”

“Your health, wealth, position, performance, ability and attitude are the results of your decisions.”

“This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change.”

“Fear of poverty is a state of mind, nothing else! But it is sufficient to destroy one’s chances of achievement in any undertaking, a truth which became painfully evident during the depression.”

“I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten--death.”

“Rise up, empower yourself and take a step. The only way to know that you still have some amount of strength in you when you fall is to attempt to rise up. However if you believe you don't have any strength, you will remain where you are!”

“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.”

“Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurance of success. Take your time and be sure.”

“What I find powerful is a person with the confidence to be her own self.”

“I learned that what happened to me did not have to define who I was. My past could not control my future unless I allowed it to.”

“But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”

“a manager “is not a person who can do the work better than his men; he is a person who can get his men to do the work better than he can.”

“Take bold decisions. Don’t let doubts fumble decisions in your mind and make you confused over them. Pursue what you are convinced to do; else you set yourself up where you do not belong.”

“Sometimes it is hard not to say, 'God forgive God.' Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.”