Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and advisor to multiple presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community known as a Black elite. Inspirational Booker T. Washington quotes will encourage growth in life, make you wiser and broaden your perspective.
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Most Famous Booker T. Washington Quotes
Of all forms of slavery there is none that is so harmful and degrading as that form of slavery which tempts one human being to hate another by reason of his race or color.
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.
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
Education is not what a person is able to hold in his head, so much as it is what a person is able to find.
Great men cultivate love… Only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.
Those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.
The great human law that in the end recognizes and rewards merit is everlasting and universal.
Opportunities never come a second time, nor do they wait for our leisure.
There is no escape — man drags man down, or man lifts man up.
The happiest people are those who do the most for others. The most miserable are those who do the least.
A whining crying race may be pitied but seldom respected.
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.
Providence so often uses men and institutions to accomplish a purpose.
The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I learned that assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; and that oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.
To young, inexperienced minds there seems to be a kind of fatal charm about the vague, the distant, and the mysterious.
We should not permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.
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.
Success is not to be measured by the position someone has reached in life, but the obstacles he has overcome while trying to succeed.
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Education is not a thing apart from life—not a system,” nor a philosophy; it is direct teaching how to live and how to work.
He who lives outside the law is a slave. The free man is the man who lives within the law, whether that law be the physical or the divine
Inspirational Booker T. Washington Quotes
A race, like an individual, lifts itself up by lifting others up.
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
It takes no more time to be polite to every one than it does to be rude.
The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.
Cast down your bucket where you are.
If you are milking cows and feel that you know all that there is to be known about it, you have simply reached the point where you are useless and unfitted for the work.
You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.
We must reinforce argument with results.
Success is not to be measured so much by the status one has attained in life but rather by the obstacles one has overcome while trying to succeed.
Character is power.
One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.
Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.
Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as the result of hard work.
Those who have accomplished the greatest results are those who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite.
Character, not circumstances, makes the man.
The thing to do when one feels sure that he has said or done the right thing and is condemned, is to stand still and keep quiet. If he is right, time will show it.
I shall never permit myself to stoop so low as to hate any man.
Then very few persons have any idea of the large number of applications for help that rich people are constantly being flooded with.
At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence
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.
In all things social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.
Men may make laws to hinder and fetter the ballot, but men cannot make laws that will bind or retard the growth of manhood.
Success always leaves footprints.
There are two ways of exerting one’s strength; one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
It means a great deal, I think, to start off on a foundation which one has made for oneself.
Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.
We all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and selfishness.
One of the highest and surest signs of civilization is that a people have learned to obey the commands of those who are placed over them.
I will permit no man to narrow & degrade my sould by making me hate him.
To be one with God is to be like God. Our real religious striving then, should be to become one with God; sharing with Him in our poor humble way His qualities and attributes.
Top Booker T. Washington Quotes
There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.
Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than to be in bad company.
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.
My experience has been that the time to test a true gentleman is to observe him when he is in contact with individuals of a race that is less fortunate than his own.
Instead of studying books so constantly, how I wish that our schools and colleges might learn to study men and things!
The study of art that does not result in making the strong less willing to suppress the weak means little.
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.
I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery.
I began learning long ago that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.
It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges.
A life is not worth much of which it cannot be said, when it comes to its close, that it was helpful to humanity.
In the long run, the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or previous history will not long keep the world from what it wants.
I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him
I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.
The one thing that is most worth living for—and dying for, if need be—is the opportunity of making someone else happier and more useful.
The world cares very little what you or I know, but it does care a great deal about what you or I do.
Too often the educational value of doing well what is done, however little, is overlooked. One thing well done prepares the mind to do the next thing better. Not how much, but how well, should be the motto. One problem thoroughly understood is of more value than a score poorly mastered.
