Quotes from Booker T. Washington

If I have done anything in life worth attention, I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother.

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

Progress, progress is the law of nature; under God it shall be our eternal guiding star.

I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.

Don't ever let them pull you down so low as to hate them. (also cited as: I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.)

I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

No one can degrade us except ourselves.

I let no man drag me down so low as to make me hate him.

Remember that everyone's life is measured by the power that individual has to make the world better-this is all life is.

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.

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.

The happiest people are those who do the most for others. The most miserable are those who do the least.

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

The negro has within him immense power for self-uplifting, but for years it will be necessary to guide and stimulate him.

There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all.

In the long run, the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or previous history will not keep the world from what it wants.

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

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 had to overcome while trying to succeed.

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

Whenever your life touches mine, you make me stronger of weaker... there is no escape... people drag others or lift others up.

Dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top.

A life is not worth much of which it cannot be said, when it comes to its close, that it was helpful to humanity.

No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts.

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.