Quotes by Booker Washington

• If you can't read, it's going to be hard to realize dreams.
• Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the every day things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.
• Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.
• No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
• 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.
• 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.
• If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
• One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.
• Character, not circumstances, makes the man.
• Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.
• Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.
• Dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top.
• 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.
• Character is power.
• At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.
• Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.
• We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers.
• Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.
• You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
• We must reinforce argument with results.
• We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
• There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.
• There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
• The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.
• To hold a man down, you have to stay down with him.
• Success is not measured by the height one has reached, but by the obstacles which he has overcome.
• Success is not measured by the heights one attains, but by the obstacles overcome along the way.