Booker T. Washington quotes

Booker T. Washington was an influential African American educator, author, and leader in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, his work focused on promoting vocational education and economic self-reliance for Black Americans. He advocated for gradual social progress and became a prominent voice for African American advancement. Here are 70 of his quotes:

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.

Booker T. Washington

There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.

Booker T. Washington

Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.

Booker T. Washington

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

Booker T. Washington

To hold a man down, you have to stay down with him.

Booker T. Washington

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

Booker T. Washington

Character, not circumstances, makes the man.

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

There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.

Booker T. Washington

The highest test of the civilization of any race is in its willingness to extend a helping hand to the less fortunate.

Booker T. Washington

Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.

Booker T. Washington

Character is power.

Booker T. Washington

Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.

Booker T. Washington

There is no escape - man drags man down, or man lifts man up.

Booker T. Washington

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs - partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Booker T. Washington

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.

Booker T. Washington

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.

Booker T. Washington

One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

Booker T. Washington

From some things that I have said one may get the idea that some of the slaves did not want freedom. This is not true. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery.

Booker T. Washington

I think I have learned that the best way to lift one's self up is to help someone else.

Booker T. Washington

Let down your bucket where you are.

Booker T. Washington

The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for and dying for, if need be is the opportunity of making someone else more happy and more useful.

Booker T. Washington