Booker T. Washington Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

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.

Booker T. Washington
The man who has learned to do something better than anyone else, has learned to do a common thing in an uncommon manner, is the man who has a power and influence that no adverse circumstances can take from him.

Booker T. Washington
The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.

Booker T. Washington
A race, like an individual, lifts itself up by lifting others up.

Booker T. Washington
My experience is that people who call themselves "The Intellectuals" understand theories, but they do not understand things.

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

Booker T. Washington
Every person who has grown to any degree of usefulness, every person who has grown to distinction, almost without exception has been a person who has risen by overcoming obstacles, by removing difficulties, by resolving that when he met discouragement he would not give up.

Booker T. Washington
It means a great deal, I think, to start off on a foundation which one has made for oneself.

Booker T. Washington
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.

Booker T. Washington
No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.

Booker T. Washington
The world cares very little what you or I know, but it does care a great deal about what you or I do.

Booker T. Washington
There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.

Booker T. Washington
In my contact with people, I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way to permit them to come into contact with other souls – with the great outside world.

Booker T. Washington
In any country, regardless of what its laws say, wherever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists. Wherever, in any country the whole people feel that the happiness of all is dependent upon the happiness of the weakest, there freedom exists.

Booker T. Washington
I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.

Booker T. Washington
In order to be successful in any undertaking, I think the main thing is for one to grow to the point where he completely forgets himself; that is, to lose himself in a great cause. In proportion as one loses himself in this way, in the same degree does he get the highest happiness out of his work.

Booker T. Washington
The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build.

Booker T. Washington