One of the points in which I was especially interested was the Jim Crow regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars and railroad trains.

Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.

The discrimination is not made openly, but a Negro who goes to such places is informed that there are no accommodations, or he is overlooked and otherwise slighted, so that he does not come again.

We muckraked, not because we hated our world, but because we loved it. We were not hopeless, we were not cynical, we were not bitter.

But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness of being right.

It is not short of amazing, the power of a great idea to weld men together. There was in it a peculiar, intense, vital spirit if you will, that I have never felt before in any strike.

There must be a technique for meeting pain. There must be a technique of endurance based on the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity, as Marcus Aurelius taught long ago.

The streets and alleys of the ward were notoriously filthy, and the contractors habitually neglected them, not failing, however, to draw their regular payments from the city treasury.

And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk.

A few years ago no hotel or restaurant in Boston refused Negro guests; now several hotels, restaurants, and especially confectionary stores, will not serve Negroes, even the best of them.

A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes.

We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.

It is ignorance or at least lack of consideration of heavenly things that make the temporal things of this world, whether good or evil, greater than they really are.

Madness is a bowl of poison cherries, chew them and die, but you die screaming in agony.

Almost every day, someone asks if I ever flat iron my hair. I say, 'No, because I'm afraid it wouldn't look good and wouldn't come back curly.'

If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.

You know you've got it, if it makes you feel good.

When you find any great project - if it's onstage or it's a movie or a television show or whatever it might be, if it's wonderful, then that sort of transcends what the medium is.

Baseball isn't a life-and-death matter, but the Red Sox are.

I firmly believe people have the power to make decisions locally and cooperatively. Anarchism is how that is put into practice.