Ray Stannard Baker Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness of being right.

Ray Stannard Baker
The discrimination is not made openly, but a Negro who goes to such places is informed that there are no accommodations, or he is overlooked and otherwise slighted, so that he does not come again.

Ray Stannard Baker
Adventure is not outside a man; it is within. It is a strange thing, once the mind goes free, what may happen to any man.

Ray Stannard Baker
Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.

Ray Stannard Baker
One of the points in which I was especially interested was the Jim Crow regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars and railroad trains.

Ray Stannard Baker
Measured by any standard, white or black, Washington must be regarded today as one of the great men of this country: and in the future he will be so honored.

Ray Stannard Baker
Human happiness is the true odor of growth, the sweet exaltation of work.

Ray Stannard Baker
Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to the question of rape.

Ray Stannard Baker
A few years ago no hotel or restaurant in Boston refused Negro guests; now several hotels, restaurants, and especially confectionery stores, will not serve Negroes, even the best of them.

Ray Stannard Baker
A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes.

Ray Stannard Baker
The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor — all conductors are white — ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

Ray Stannard Baker
And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk.

Ray Stannard Baker
I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year.

Ray Stannard Baker
There is nothing quite so mercilessly destructive in science as the discovery of a new law.

Ray Stannard Baker
Most of us have collections of sayings we live by.... Whenever words fly up at me from the printed page as I read, I intercept them instantly, knowing they are for me. I turn them over carefully in my mind and cling to them hard.

Ray Stannard Baker