Browsing Topic Best African American Quotes

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to relieve the sufferings of others.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

Don’t settle for average. Bring your best to the moment. Then, whether it fails or succeeds, at least you know you gave all you had. We need to live the best that’s in us.

There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.

Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.

It isn’t where you came from, it’s where you’re going that counts.

It doesn’t matter how strong your opinions are. If you don’t use your power for positive change, you are, indeed, part of the problem.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

If you are confident you have done everything possible to prepare yourself, then there is nothing to fear.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.

I believe in individuality, that everybody is special, and it’s up to them to find that quality and let it live.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.

Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

It is a blessing to die for a cause, because you can so easily die for nothing.

Black! Black! Black! I am proud of being a Negro. Nor have I ever tried to beg tolerance from anyone. Superiority is not proved by color, but by the brain, by education, by willpower, by moral courage.

I was supposed to be grateful because I one was one of the first African Americans coaching. I was supposed to sit there and say, ‘Oh, thank you Mr. White Man for giving me a job.’ God made me human and equal. Now I’m supposed to be grateful because you’re treating me equal and treating me as a human being? No.

Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater.

The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself – the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us – that’s where it’s at.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.

What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.

… social evils are dangerously contagious. The fixed policy of persecution and injustice against a class of women who are weak and defenseless will be necessarily hurtful to the cause of all women.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.