“No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute - this is the only way of human life.”

“I insist that the question of the future is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and difficulties of the present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future”

“If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous words, “the problem of the color line,” then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification.”

“Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.”

“Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.”

“Education and work are the levers to uplift a people.”

“Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.”

“A system of education is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter of schools. Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.”

“The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”

“In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.”

“Education is the development of power and ideal.”