Empowerment

Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas—and you have to work through it all.

People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Tell them that the sacrifice was not in vain. Tell them that by way of the shop, the field, the skilled hand, habits of thrift and economy, by way of industrial school and college, we are coming. We are crawling up, working up, yea, bursting up. Often through oppression, unjust discrimination, and prejudice, but through them, we are coming up. And with proper habits, intelligence, and property, there is no power on earth that can permanently stay our progress.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

A child’s nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another human being.

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life— is the source from which self-respect springs.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

What’s a man’s first duty? The answer’s brief: to be himself.

There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Most people live . . . in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness . . . much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.

Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

If a life can have a theme song, and I believe every worthwhile one has, mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism.

to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

To be a hero, one must give an order to oneself.

Ability is not something to be saved, like money, in the hope that you can draw interest on it. The interest comes from the spending. Unused ability, like unused muscles, will atrophy.

What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations … is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one’s own efforts.

What I am looking for is not out there … it’s in me.

Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.