Education

Education counts a lot, no matter what our status in life is. Read these wise adages on education from noteworthy Blacks.

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.
Frederick Douglass, Address, Washington, D.C

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
Maya Angelou

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.
Oprah Winfrey

Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.
Maya Angelou

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.
Marian Wright Edelman

Education is all a matter of building bridges.
Ralph Ellison

Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
Marian Wright Edelman

Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.
George Washington Carver

EDUCATION is the medium by which a people are prepared for the creation of their own particular civilization, and the advancement and glory of their own race.
Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.
Malcolm X

From the first, I made my learning, what little it was, useful every way I could.
Mary McLeod Bethune

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
Malcolm X

I think education is power. I think that being able to communicate with people is power. One of my main goals on the planet is to encourage people to empower themselves.
Oprah Winfrey

I think going to college for that one year was probable the best thing I have ever done.
Carmelo Anthony

I'm not comfortable being preachy, but more people need to start spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball court.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

If they took the idea that they could escape poverty through education, I think it would make a more basic and long-lasting change in the way things happen. What we need are positive, realistic goals and the willingness to work. Hard work and practical goals.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

It is hard to apply oneself to study when there is no money to pay for food and lodging. I almost never explain these things when folks are asking me why I don't do this or that.
Zora Neale Hurston

It is not who you attend school with but who controls the school you attend.
Nikki Giovanni

My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
Malcolm X

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
Maya Angelou

Nothing should be overlooked in fighting for better education. Be persistent and ornery: this will be good for the lethargic educational establishment and will aid the whole cause of public education.
Roy Wilkins

Parents have become so convinced educators know what is best for children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.
Marian Wright Edelman

Teaching civility is an obligation of the family.
Stephen Carter, Carter's Laws of Civility

The educational system of a country is worthless unless it [revolutionizes the social order]. Men of scholarship, and prophetic insight, must show us the right way and lead us into light which is shining brighter and brighter.
Carter G. Woodson

The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work.
Michael Jackson

The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.
Richard Wright

The masses make the nation and the race. If the masses are illiterate, that is the judgment passed on the race by those who are critical of its existence.
Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

The mere imparting of information is not education.
Carter G. Woodson

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
Maya Angelou

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.
Mary McLeod Bethune

Too often the educational value of doing well what is done, however little, is overlooked. One thing well done prepares the mind to do the next thing better. Not how much, but how well, should be the motto. One problem thoroughly understood is of more value than a score poorly mastered.
Booker T. Washington

We must change the system of education and instruction. Unfortunately, history has shown us that brotherhood must be learned, when it should be natural.
Josephine Baker

When bright young minds can't afford college, America pays the price.
Arthur Ashe

Without education, you are not going anywhere in this world.
Malcolm X