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

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.

Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage ground.

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, they are doomed for all time. It is not a case of ethics; it is a plain case of necessity. The method by which this may be done is, first, for the American Negro to achieve a new economic solidarity.