Booker T. Washington

Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your…

Now the point I especially want to make to-night is this: all of you must bear in mind the fact that you are not only to keep yourselves clean, and pure, and sober, and true, in every respect, but you owe a constant responsibility to…

Just in proportion as you learn to rise above them and trample them under your feet, just in that proportion will you accomplish the high purpose for which you came here, and help to accomplish the purpose for which this institution exists.

Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make…

The future will have for the South swift or slow development of its masses and of its soil in proportion to the swift or slow development of this kind of training.

We do ourselves no good when we yield to that temptation.

This is the point I want to make with you; that one of the reasons you are here is that you may learn to overcome difficulties.

I want you to see, as I think you will see, that having a hard time, running up against difficulties here and there, helps to make an individual strong, helps to make him powerful.

Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.

One of the highest and surest signs of civilization is that a people have learned to obey the commands of those who are placed over them.

In the matter of truth and high honour I do not believe that the average Frenchman is ahead of the American Negro; while so far as mercy and kindness to dumb animals go, I believe that my race is far ahead.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.