Bilal > Bilal's Quotes

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings

“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 overcome while trying to succeed.”
― Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography

“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”
― Booker T. Washington

“You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.”
― Booker T. Washington

“Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than to be in bad company.”
― Booker T. Washington

“Character, not circumstance, makes the person.”
― Booker T. Washington

“There are two ways of exerting one's strength; one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.”
― Booker T. Washington, and many others Frederick Douglass

“Success always leaves footprints.”
― Booker T. Washington

“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.”
― Booker T. Washington

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
― Booker T. Washington

“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.”
― Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery

“The world cares little about what a man knows;it cares more about what a man is able to do.”
― Booker T. Washington

“Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity”
― Booker T. Washington

“The happiest people are those who do the most for others. The most miserable are those who do the least.”
― Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery