Quotes About Education From Black Leaders
Looking for inspiration from Black leaders on education? Here are 99 quotes about education from some of the most influential Black leaders throughout history:
Nelson Mandela
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
Malcolm X
“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
Maya Angelou
“Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.”
Frederick Douglass
“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
Barack Obama
“The future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create.”
Carter G. Woodson
“If you can control a man’s thinking, you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”
W.E.B. Du Bois
“Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.”
Angela Davis
“Education is not just about going to school and getting a degree. It’s about widening your knowledge and absorbing the truth about life.”
Booker T. Washington
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
Sojourner Truth
“I have as much muscle as any man and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can bear witness to the equality of the sexes for I have labored side by side with men and I have seen a woman lift as much as a man.”
Ida B. Wells
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
James Baldwin
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
Toni Morrison
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Langston Hughes
“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”
Harriet Tubman
“I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”
Claudia Rankine
“You are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.”
Stokely Carmichael
“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
Assata Shakur
“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
Zora Neale Hurston
“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”
Octavia Butler
“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”
Frantz Fanon
“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
bell hooks
“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.”
Alice Walker
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Amiri Baraka
“Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.”
Bayard Rustin
“We need in every community a group of angelic troublemakers.”
Paul Robeson
“It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.”
Shirley Chisholm
“Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.”
John Lewis
“You are a light. You are the light. Never let anyone—any person or any force—dampen, dim or diminish your light.”
Medgar Evers
“You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.”
Marcus Garvey
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”
Patrice Lumumba
“The only way to deal with colonialism and imperialism is to take it by the horns.”
Bob Marley
“The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.”
Bob Moses
“If you are not a part of the solution, then you are a part of the problem.”
Paulo Freire
“Education does not transform the world. Education changes people. People change the world.”
Nikki Giovanni
“We love because it’s the only true adventure.”
James Weldon Johnson
“We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, / We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.”
Cornel West
“Justice is what love looks like in public.”
Michael Eric Dyson
“Greatness is not measured by what a man or woman accomplishes, but by the opposition he or she has overcome to reach his goals.”
Michelle Obama
“Success is only meaningful and enjoyable if it feels like your own.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates
“I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”
Audre Lorde
“When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
Henry Highland Garnet
“It is for us to decide whether we will be slaves or free men.”
Mary McLeod Bethune
“We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward good ends.”
James Baldwin
“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”
Maya Angelou
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Malcolm X
“You don’t have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.”
Frederick Douglass
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
Barack Obama
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
Carter G. Woodson
“Real education means to inspire people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin with life as they find it and make it better.”
Sojourner Truth
“Truth is powerful and it prevails