Booker T. Washington quotes

The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.

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 overcome while trying to succeed.

At that institution I got my first taste of what it meant to live a life of unselfishness, my first knowledge of the fact that the happiest individuals are those who do the most to make others useful and happy.

To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbour, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.

In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

“Cast down your bucket where you are.”

Before the end of the year, I think I began learning that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.

The great human law that in the end recognizes and rewards merit is everlasting and universal.

As they went on describing the school, it seemed to me that it must be the greatest place on earth, and not even Heaven presented more attractions for me at that time than did the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, about which these men were talking.

There was never a time in the history of the American Negro when he did not show an eagerness to learn. Whether on the plantation in the far South, where ignorance in the slave was slavery’s only security, or in the northern states, where schools were closed against him by popular prejudice, he was always struggling, by night and by day, to obtain an education.

The most important and creditable thing in his career as slave or freeman, and the most striking thing in his achievements, is his passion and struggle to lift from himself and his race the dark mantle of ignorance.

The North was very reluctant to make slavery an issue; the South was always willing to be challenged on that issue. In the North, the Negro was a problem; in the South, he was property. It is always easier to deal with property than to deal with a problem.

The armies on both sides of the conflict were indebted to the black man as friend and as fighter. In the South, he fought against himself; in the North, he fought for himself.