1
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washingtonverified·Address at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, in Up from Slavery·September 18, 1895
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2
Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.
Eleanor Rooseveltmisattributed·The Invincible Strategy, in The Supreme Conquest and Other Sermons Preached in America, by W. L. Watkinson·1907
Wrongly attributed
Adlai Stevenson used a version of this in his eulogy for Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962, and it has been hers ever since; it is also sold as Confucius and as an old Chinese proverb. It is neither. It is W. L. Watkinson, the English Methodist preacher, in a sermon called The Invincible Strategy, printed in 1907 -- and he presents it as a saying already in circulation rather than as his own coinage. What is certain is that this is the earliest printed appearance anybody has produced, and it predates Roosevelt's public life.
3
Reader, it is not to awaken sympathy for myself that I am telling you truthfully what I suffered in slavery.
4
That even one individual in a society should be debarred from undertaking that form of social toil for which it is most fitted, makes an unnecessary deficit in the general social assets.