Among the top ten things I've learned in life: when your hair stylist is having a bad day, reschedule.

And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.

While most girls run away from home to marry, I ran away to teach.

Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.

Stop using the word 'Negro.' The word is a misnomer from every point of view. It does not represent a country or anything else ... I am an African-American.

It is only through the home that a people can become really good and truly great.

If you align expectations with reality, you will never be disappointed.

You will have to look at the tape. Actually, you could burn the tape. It's not even worth looking at... We just have to move on to next week. If we just get the next one we will be fine.

Instead of me having a breakdown, I'm focusing on me having a breakthrough.

I think people change, but the media, they never allowed me to change. They never allowed me to be a better person

As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head

I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.

Such sentences always end in silence, no matter how they may begin--indeed, this is the very essence of fate: that which we never quite manage to say.

People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.

When our lives are filled with peace, faith and joy, people will want to know what we have.

A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren't always clear to him. It's often a matter of intuition.

Attachments to older forms of worship may be comfortable, but they may contain elements of falsehood that make them unacceptable to God.

No matter how busy you are make time to eat at a table. A desk is not a table.

I've always been very hopeful but I also know that as long as you've got a good work ethic, almost anything is achievable and I learned that in the armed forces.

I know my parents are really proud of me, and they think I've become successful, so that's nice, but there's still so much I want to achieve in my life.

If you buy the things you don't need, you will soon be selling the things that you need.