“A child that knows nothing of God’s earth, of green fields, or sparkling brooks, of breezy hill and springy heather, and whose mind is stored with none of the beauties of nature, but knows only the drunkenness prevalent in the hideous slum it is forced to live in, and whose walks abroad have never extended beyond the corner public-house and the pawnshop, cannot be benefited by education. Such children grow up to depraved, and become a danger and terror to the State; wealth-destroyers instead of wealth-producers.”

“The woman who creates and sustains a home, and under whose hands children grow up to be strong and pure men and women, is a creator second only to God.”

“Beyond these wild winds and gloomy skies,
beyond death’s cloudy portal, there is a land where beauty never dies and love becomes immortal,
a land whose light is never dimmed by shadow,
where nothing beautiful can ever fade,
but blooms for aye eternal.”

“There’s a land far away mid the stars,
Where they know not the sorrows of time
Where the pure waters wander through valleys of gold
A land whose light is never dimmed by shadow,
Whose fields are ever vernal,
Where nothing beautiful can ever fade,
But blooms for aye eternal.”

“The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.”

“I walk where once the grass was green
And mourn the lark that sings no more
What bird could sing whose eyes have seen
Broken blossoms on the field of war?”

“Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;”

“To die is to become like a child, at last one knows nothing, nothing of death and nothing of life, only that all distances are equally long and all words unintelligible but beautiful.”

“There is a true, religious devotion in the mind and feelings of that man whose soul springs forth in beauty and power, whose physical form is upright and symmetrical, and who, in fulfilling the laws of health, fulfils the laws of Deity. There is a true religion in the intellectual man, who, penetrating deeply into the earth, and air, and sky, for scientific investigation, culls all the treasures of thought and beauty, and stores them up in his memory as sacred and divine.”

“He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the earth — they, and they only.”