Booker T. Washington

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

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

Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.

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

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.

I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.

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

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

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.

(Thanks to Flickr’s discoverblackheritage for the photo.)