No man who continues to add something to the material, intellectual, and moral well-being of the place in which he lives is long left without proper … - Booker T. Washington

Success is not measured by the position one has reached in life, rather by the obstacles one overcomes while trying to succeed

the long and bitter political struggle in which he had engaged against slavery had not prepared Mr. Douglass to take up the equally difficult task of fitting the Negro for the opportunities and responsibilities of freedom. The same was true to a large extent of other Negro leaders. At the time when I met these men and heard them speak I was invariably impressed, though young and inexperienced, that there was something lacking in their public utterances. I felt that the millions of Negroes needed something more than to be reminded of their sufferings and of their political rights; that they needed to do something more than merely to defend themselves.

I said that any individual who learned to do something better than anybody else — learned to do a common thing in an uncommon manner — had solved his problem, regardless of the colour of his skin, and that in proportion as the Negro learned to produce what other people wanted and must have, in the same proportion would he be respected.