Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own.

The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people.

This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.

The author takes the position that the consumer pays the tax, and as such every individual of the social order should be given unlimited opportunity to make the most of himself.

The different ness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess.

Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.

I am a radical.

In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.

The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.

Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination.

I am not afraid of being sued by white businessmen. In fact, I should welcome such a law suit.

Negro banks, as a rule, have failed because the people, taught that their own pioneers in business cannot function in this sphere, withdrew their deposits.

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.

And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.

This crusade is much more important than the anti- lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.

They still have some money, and they have needs to supply. They must begin immediately to pool their earnings and organize industries to participate in supplying social and economic demands.

The strongest bank in the United States will last only so long as the people will have sufficient confidence in it to keep their money there.

We do not show the Negro how to overcome segregation, but we teach him how to accept it as final and just.

The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.

In fact, the confidence of the people is worth more than money.

In the long run, there is not much discrimination against superior talent.

Let us banish fear.

I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me.

If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

Our most widely known scholars have been trained in universities outside of the South.

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

The mere imparting of information is not education.

In the long run there is not much discrimination against superior talent.

The real servant of the people must live among them, think with them, feel for them, and die for them.

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

I'm an avid biography reader.

Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.

I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.

I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.