1. "I am a Negro--and beautiful." - Langston Hughes

2. "Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me." - Zora Neale Hurston

3. “Where there is no vision, there is no hope.” - George Washington Carver

4. “Truth is powerful and it prevails.” - Sojourner Truth

5. "Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe." - Frederick Douglass

6. "I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to two things, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other." - Harriet Tubman

7. "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandela

8. "If a man is not loyal to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything." - Claude McKay

9. "I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues." - Duke Ellington

10. "You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling." - Billie Holiday

11. "It isn't where you came from that counts, it's where you're going." - Ella Fitzgerald

12. "Success is to be measured not so much by the position one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome." - Booker T. Washington

13. "Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope." - Maya Angelou

14. "A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything." - Malcolm X

15. "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King, Jr.