My work is the art I paint on the canvas of my life. Hopefully I'm creating a masterpiece.

Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one

Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal.

A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know where it is today.

Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.

A land without memories is a people without liberty.

Remember, we are all one country now. Dismiss from your mind all sectional feeling, and bring them up to be Americans.

I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.

Everybody wants happiness, and nobody wants pain, but you can't have a rainbow without a little rain.

Evil influence is like a nicotine patch, you cannot help but absorb what sticks to you.

There’s a way to live like a god.

There are many things in this life one can plan for, anticipate, control, manipulate, but love is not one of them.

sometimes the best thing to do is to pretend it didn't happen

When the Negro learns what manner of man he is spiritually, he will wake up all over. He will stop playing white even on the stage. He will rise in the majesty of his own soul.

...I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

I've been trying to get Mr. Finchem to lengthen 5 and 7 and 14 and 18 - and he's being a mule.

Recalling an old magistrate's words to a young attorney, The rain it raineth on the just And also on the unjust fella; But chiefly on the just, because The unjust steals the just's umbrella.

I'm stupidly proud of myself.