"The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident."

"White people are not the problem. It is the problem of white people that they think they are the problem."

"It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."

"It seems to me that the human race is like a lot of children playing in a nursery, and the grown-ups are not coming."

"I have been a Negro, and I have been a woman, and I have been an American. And I have been all of these things at once."