Political Leaders

"Unlimited freedom, absolute democracy, are reefs upon which all the republics have come to grief."

"{{Citation"

"When I contemplate this immense reunited country, my soul mounts to that height demanded by the colossal perspective of a picture so wonderful. My imagination takes flight toward future ages and admiringly observes from them the prosperity, the splendor, and the life which will exist within this vast territory. I am carried away; and I seem to behold it in the heart of the universe, stretching along its extensive coasts between two oceans which nature has separated; but which our fatherland has united by long and wide canals. I see it serve as the bond, as the center, as the emporium of the human race. I see it sending to the ends of the earth the treasures of gold and silver which its mountains contain. I see it, through the healing virtue of its plants, dispensing health and life to afflicted men of the Old World. I see it disclosing its precious secrets to the sages who know that the store of knowledge is more valuable than the store of riches which nature has so prodigally bestowed upon us. I see it seated upon the throne of liberty, the scepter of justice in its hand, crowned by glory, showing to the Old World the majesty of the New World."

"Liberty, says Rousseau, is a succulent food, but difficult to digest. Our feeble fellow citizens will have to strengthen their mind much before they will be ready to assimilate such wholesome nourishment."

"A perverted people, should it attaint its liberty, is bound to lose this very soon, because it would be useless to try to impress upon such people that happiness lies in the practice of righteousness; that the reign of law is more powerful than the reign of tyrants, who are more inflexible, and all ought to submit to the wholesome severity of the law; that good morals, and not force, are the pillars of the law and that the exercise of justice is the exercise of liberty."

"The continuation of authority in the same person has frequently proved the undoing of democratic governments. Repeated elections are essential to the system of popular governments, because there is nothing so dangerous as to suffer Power to be vested for a long time in one citizen. The people become accustomed to obeying him, and he becomes accustomed to commanding, hence the origin of usurpation and tyranny."

"Let us give to our republic a fourth power with authority over the youth, the hearts of men, public spirit, habits, and republican morality. Let us establish this Areopagus to watch over the education of the children, to supervise national education, to purify whatever may be corrupt in the republic, to denounce ingratitude, coldness in the country's service, egotism, sloth, idleness, and to pass judgment upon the first signs of corruption and pernicious example."

"Let the entire system of government be strengthened, and let the balance of power be drawn up in such a manner that it will be permanent and incapable of decay because of its own tenuity. Precisely because no form of government is so weak as the democratic, its framework must be firmer, and its institutions must be studied to determine their degree of stability … unless this is done, we will have to reckon with an ungovernable, tumultuous, and anarchic society, not with a social order where happiness, peace, and justice prevail."

"We have been ruled more by deceit than by force, and we have been degraded more by vice than by superstition. Slavery is the daughter of darkness: an ignorant people is a blind instrument of its own destruction. Ambition and intrigue abuses the credulity and experience of men lacking all political, economic, and civic knowledge; they adopt pure illusion as reality; they take license for liberty, treachery for patriotism, and vengeance for justice. If a people, perverted by their training, succeed in achieving their liberty, they will soon lose it, for it would be of no avail to endeavor to explain to them that happiness consists in the practice of virtue; that the rule of law is more powerful than the rule of tyrants, because, as the laws are more inflexible, every one should submit to their beneficent austerity; that proper morals, and not force, are the bases of law; and that to practice justice is to practice liberty."

"Flee the country where a lone man holds all power: It is a nation of slaves. - Speech spoken in Caracas on 1814, January 2nd."

"Venezuelans! An army of brothers, sent by the Supreme Congress of New Granada, has come to liberate you, and is now amongst you after having expelled the oppressors from the provinces of Mérida and Trujillo. We have been sent to destroy the Spaniards, to protect Americans and to re-establish the republican governments which made up the Venezuelan Confederation. The states which we have liberated are once again ruled by their old constitutions and leaders, and they fully enjoy their liberty and independence. Our sole mission is to break the chains of servitude which still oppress some of our peoples. We have no intention of passing laws or exercising power, even though the laws of war might authorize us to do so."

"The most grievous error committed by Venezuela in making her start on the political stage was, as none can deny, her fatal adoption of the system of tolerance—a system long condemned as weak and inadequate by every man of common sense, yet tenaciously maintained with an unparalleled blindness to the very end."

"Damn it, how will I ever get out of this labyrinth?"

"Do not compare your material forces with those of the enemy. Spirit cannot be compared with matter. You are human beings, they are beasts. You are free, they are slaves. Fight, and you shall win. For God grants victory to perseverance."

"The three greatest fools of History have been Jesus Christ, Don Quixote . . . and me!"

"Colombians! My last wish is for the happiness of the patria. If my death contributes to the end of partisanship and the consolidation of the union, I shall be lowered in peace into my grave."

"The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty."

"Among the popular and representative systems of government I do not approve of the federal system: it is too perfect; and it requires virtues and political talents much superior to our own."

"I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender."

"If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions."

"The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."

"Yes, indeed, we must fly, but not with our feet, but with our hands.."

"Farewell, good Strato. — Caesar now be still: I kill'd not thee with half so good a will."

"The Xanthians, suspecting my kindness, have made their country the grave of their despair; the Patareans, trusting themselves to me, enjoy in all points their former liberty; it is in your power to choose the judgment of the Patareans or the fortune of the Xanthians."

"Your councils be long, your doings be slow, consider the end."

"My whole life has largely been one of surprises. I believe that any man's life will be filled with constant, unexpected encouragements of this kind if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day of his life — that is, tries to make each day reach as nearly as possible the high-water mark of pure, unselfish, useful living."

"I am just as much opposed to Booker T. Washington as a voter as I am to the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored typical little coon who blacks my shoes every morning."

"Social equality carries with it civil equality, political equality, financial equality, judicial equality, business equality, and wherever social equality is denied by legislative enactments and judicial decrees, the sequel must be discrimination, proscription, injustice and degradation. ... With all due respect to Prof. Washington personally, for we do respect him personally, he will have to live a long time to undo the harm he has done to our race. His remarks on social equality, which is nothing more than civil equality, will be quoted by newspapers, magazines, periodicals, legislatures, congressmen, lawyers, judges and all grades of whites to prove that the Negro race is satisfied with being degraded, not that the Professor meant it, but such will be the construction given it by our civil and political enemies."

"Silence is tantamount to being virtually an accomplice in the treasonable act of this Benedict Arnold of the Negro race."

"What man is a worse enemy to a race than a leader who looks with equanimity on the disfranchisement of his race in a country where other races have universal suffrage by constitutions?"

"The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again."

"The race that can produce a Booker T. Washington in a century ought to feel it can do miracles in time."

"It is not hyperbole to say that Booker T. Washington was a great American. For twenty years before his death he had been the most useful, as well as the most distinguished, member of his race in the world, and one of the most useful, as well as one of the most distinguished, of American citizens of any race."

"The vast majority of Negros are members of or associated with either the Baptist Church or the several branches of the Methodist Church. ... So strong has been their allegiance to these two denominations that Dr. Booker T. Washington used to say, with his characteristic humor, that if ever you discovered a Negro who was not either a Baptist or a Methodist, some white man had been tampering with his religion."

"For a hundred years since emancipation, Negroes had searched tor the elusive path to freedom. They knew that they had to fashion a body of tactics suitable for their unique and special conditions. The words of the Constitution had declared them free, but life had told them that they were a twice-burdened people—they lived in the lowest stratum of society, and within it they were additionally imprisoned by a caste of color. For decades the long and winding trails led to dead ends. Booker T. Washington, in the dark days that followed Reconstruction, advised them: “Let down your buckets where you are.” Be content, he said in effect, with doing well what the times permit you to do at all. However, this path, they soon felt, had too little freedom in its present and too little promise in its future."

"Before embarking on his illustrious career as an educator and activist, Booker T. Washington, the son of enslaved parents, spent part of his childhood working in the salt furnaces of the Kanawha Salines. "Though I was a mere child, my stepfather put me and my brother at work in one of the furnaces," he explained in his autobiography. "Often I began work as early as four o'clock in the morning." At the time, Washington was nine years old."

"Historical and contemporary judgments affirm that Washington was in reality “a great accommodator.” But to create Tuskegee in Alabama in that era he could hardly have been otherwise. He did create Tuskegee—a splendid achievement—but, in so doing, was in turn almost forced to create of himself an image of national leadership. But in time, he grew to like this image and eventually to take advantage of it, so his enemies claimed, for the exercise of power itself. As a bridge between the white and colored peoples of the United States, he sought and gained more often than not the favors of the white power structure from which came the endowments supporting Tusekegee."

"His modesty, his patience, his forbearance, are sublime."

"What strikes you, first and last, in Mr. Washington is his constant common sense. He has lived heroic poetry, and he can, therefore, afford to talk simple prose. Simple prose it is, but of sterling worth, and such as it is a pleasure to listen to as long as he chooses to talk. It is interfused with the sweet, brave humor which qualifies his writing, and which enables him, like Dunbar, to place himself outside his race, when he wishes to see it as others see it, and to report its exterior effect from his interior knowledge."

"There is nothing more touching in his book than the passages which record her devotion and her constant endeavor to help him find the way so dark to her. There is nothing more beautiful and uplifting in literature than the tender reverence, the devout honor with which he repays her affection. His birth was a part of slavery, and she was, in his eyes, as blameless for its conditions as if it had all the sanctions. The patience, the fearless frankness, with which he accepts and owns the facts, are not less than noble; and it is not to their white fathers, but to their black mothers, that such men as Fredrick Douglass and Booker Washington justly ascribe what is best in their natures."

"We are a people born of many peoples. Our culture, our skills, our very aspirations have been shaped by immigrants—and their sons and daughters—from all the earth. Sam Gompers from England, Andrew Carnegie from Scotland, Albert Einstein from Germany—and Booker T. Washington and Al Smith—Marconi and Caruso—men of all nations and races and estates—they have made us what we are."

"So thoroughly did he learn the speech and thought of triumphal commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity, that the picture of a lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of absurdities. One wonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi would say to this."

"I have for some years had the pleasure of Mr. Booker Washington's acquaintance, and I share with all those who know the facts the appreciation of the services he has rendered and is rendering to the solution of one of the gravest and most perplexing problems of our time. He is a man who, in every sense, deserves well of his contemporaries, and I believe that, when hereafter the story is written of Christian people's endeavour in our day to atone for and to amend the racial wrongdoings of the past, Mr. Booker Washington's name will stand in the very forefront of those for whom the world will give thanks."

"Booker Washington is the combined Moses and Joshua of his people. Not only has he led them to the promised land, but still lives to teach them by example and precept how properly to enjoy it."

"Washington, unlike many other Black leaders of his time was a frequent traveler in the Deep South who knew the conditions firsthand instead of the abstract. Washington was a witness to the violence and racism of Jim Crow in the Black Belt and lived beside desperate poverty and illiteracy. Because of the paradoxical nature of being both a pragmatic realist and a utopian separatist, Washington sometimes expressed conflicting and ambiguous positions on issues."

"Washington performed on the world stage as a moral charismatic leader representing African Americans. Some strongly believe he failed in that role; others believe that he succeeded against the odds. Some believe he was a trickster and self-made man; others firmly believe he was tricked and was a "made-man" by white power brokers. Whatever one's position, it is undeniable that Washington was an influential educational, business, cultural and political leader. He certainly had all the basics of leadership: a vision, a means of implementing the vision, and the enthusiasm of followers."

"He was a thinker rooted in the Bible and Shakespeare, a lover of epigrams, a teller of folksy tales, a prodigious writer, and theatrical in his method of inspiring crowds."

"Booker T. Washington advised, networked, cut deals, made threats, pressured, punished enemies, rewarded friends, greased palms, manipulated the media, signed autographs, read minds with the skill of a master psychologist, strategized, raised money, always knew where the camera was pointing, traveled with an entourage, waved the flag with patriotic speeches, and claimed to have no interest in partisan politics. In other words, he was an artful politician. He was not a lawyer, scholar, college-bred man, or a military hero. But he knew how to use the power of symbolism through the lens of a storyteller."

"Almost everything Washington said or did was shot through with a certain irony. He bowed before the prejudices of the meanest Southerner, but he moved in circles in the North which were closed to all but a few white men. He told Negroes that Jim Crow was irrelevant, but he himself violated the law by riding first class in Pullman cars with Southern white men and women. And irony of ironies: he who advised Negroes to forget about politics wielded more political power than any other Negro in American history."