Booker T. Washington: “I believe that we are at our best in country life--in agricultural life--and too often at our worst in city life.”

If my life in the past has meant anything in the lifting up of my people and the bringing about of better relations between your race and mine, I assure you from this day it will mean doubly more.

How shall we make the mansion on yon Beacon Street feel and see the need of the spirits in the lowliest cabin in Alabama cotton-fields or Louisiana sugar-bottoms?

Wherever our graduates go, the changes which soon begin to appear in the buying of land, improving homes, saving money, in education, and in high moral characters are remarkable.

By it a race must rise or fall, succeed or fail, and in the last analysis mere sentiment counts for little.