Outstanding people have one thing in common: an absolute sense of mission
It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
A question that sometimes drives me hazy: Am I, or the others, crazy?
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
Poverty is... Curable like any disease. Ignorance, dependence, inefficiency, laziness, want of the spirit of enterprise are the real real causes of poverty.
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.
The whole universe is contained within a single human being – you.
As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.
The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.
Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.
To live alone is the fate of all great souls.
Everywhere man blames nature and fate yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passion, his mistakes and his weaknesses.
There is no come back to caves. We are too many.
If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
