Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage ground.
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks
The question of the future is how best to keep these millions [of African American men] from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving.
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks
Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you.
Ta-Neshi Coats,
About he and his son the night they heard there was no indictment for the police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, Between the World and Me.
One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The dread of evil is a much more forcible principle of human actions than the prospect of good.
John Locke
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black …
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Robert F. Kennedy,
His address in Indianapolis, the day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis
For a Dignity Deserved 