Booker T. Washington

Booker Talifero Washington

• Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.

• Character is power.

• Character, not circumstances, makes the man.

• Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

• From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom. This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery.

• I believe that any man's life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement, if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day, and as nearly as possible reaching the high water mark of pure and useful living.

• 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. Out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.

• I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
  • Variant: I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.
  • Variant: I let no man drag me down so low as to make me hate him.

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

• No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.

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

• Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.

• One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.
  • Variant: You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

• The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts.

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

• There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.

• We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.