Marcus Garvey famous quotes

If we as a people realized the greatness from which we came we would be less likely to disrespect ourselves.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Greatness #People #Disrespect

The Black skin is not a badge of shame, but rather a glorious symbol of national greatness.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Greatness #Racism #Black

If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Confidence #Race #Self

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Love #Friendship #Relationship

Intelligence rules the world, ignorance carries the burden...
-- Marcus Garvey

#Ignorance #World #Burden

Ambition is the desire to go forward and improve one's condition. It is a burning flame that lights up the life of the individual and makes him see himself in another state. To be ambitious is to be great in mind and soul. To want that which is worth while and strive for it. To go on without looking back, reaching to that which gives satisfaction.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Ambition #Light #Flames

Be as proud of your race today as our as our fathers were in days of yore. We have beautiful history, and we shall create another in the future that will astonish the world.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Beautiful #Father #Race

There can be no peace among men and nations, so long as the strong continues to oppress the weak, so long as injustice is done to other peoples, just so long we will have cause for war, and make a lasting peace an impossibility.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Strong #War #Men

With confidence, you have won before you have started.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Confidence #Being Yourself #Love Yourself

Every man has a right to his own opinion. Every race has a right to its own action; therefore let no man persuade you against your will, let no other race influence you against your own.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Men #Race #Action

The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind
-- Marcus Garvey

#Men #Mind #Use

I have no desire to take all black people back to Africa; there are blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there.
-- Marcus Garvey

#People #Black #Desire

I like honesty and fair play.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Honesty #Play #Fair Play

I know no national boundary where the Negro is concerned. The whole world is my province until Africa is free.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Freedom #Racism #World

Our success educationally, industrially and politically is based upon the protection of a nation founded by ourselves. And the nation can be nowhere else but in Africa.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Protection

Rise up Black Men, and take your stand. Reach up black men and women and pull all nature’s knowledge to you. Turn ye around and make a conquest of everything North and South, East and West. And then we you have wrought well, you will have merited God's blessing, you will become God's chosen people and naturally you'll become leaders of the world.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Blessing #Men #People

If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Civilization #Poison #Drink

It is unfortunate that we should find ourselves at this time the only disorganized group. Others have had the advantage of organization for centuries, so what seems to them unnecessary, from a racial point of view, becomes necessary to us, who have had to labor all along under the disadvantage of being scattered without a racial aim or purpose.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Views #Organization #Racism

A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Reading #Writing #Men

The white man has succeeded in subduing the world by forcing everybody to think his way....The white man's propaganda has made him the master of the world, and all those who have come in contact with it and accepted it have become his slaves.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Men #Thinking #White

Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Men #Mind #Body

God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement.
-- Marcus Garvey

#God #Law #Sky

In a world of wolves one should go armed, and one of the most powerful defensive weapons within the reach of Negroes is the practice of race first in all parts of the world.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Powerful #Practice #Race

Lose not courage, lose not faith, go forward.
-- Marcus Garvey

This propaganda of dis-associating Western Negroes from Africa is not a new one. For many years white propagandists have been printing tons of literature to impress scattered Ethiopia, especially that portion within their civilization, with the idea that Africa is a despised place, inhabited by savages, and cannibals, where no civilized human being should go, especially black civilized human beings. This propaganda is promulgated for the cause that is being realized today. That cause is COLONIAL EXPANSION for the white nations of the world.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Years #Civilization #Ideas

Men who are in earnest are not afraid of consequences.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Men #African American #Words Of Wisdom

All peoples are struggling to blast a way through the industrial monopoly of races and nations, but the Negro as a whole has failed to grasp its true significance and seems to delight in filling only that place created for him by the white man.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Struggle #Men #Race

She makes one happy, then miserable. You are to her kind, then unkind. Constant yet inconstant. Thus we have WOMAN. No real man can do without her.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Real #Women #Kind

American suffragist, speech "Is Woman Suffrage Progressing?" at Stockholm, Sweden Radicalism is a label that is always applied to people who are endeavoring to get freedom.
-- Marcus Garvey

#People #Progress #Labels

Before we can properly help the people, we have to destroy the old education... that teaches them that somebody is keeping them back and that God has forgotten them and that they can't rise because of their color.. we can only build... with faith in ourselves and with self-reliance, believing in our own possibilities, that we can rise to the highest in God's creation.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Believe #Godly #Self

A people without the knowledge of...
-- Marcus Garvey

#People #African American

Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden. Therefore, remove yourself as far as possible from ignorance and seek as far as possible to be intelligent.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Ignorance #Intelligent #World

There shall be no solution to this race problem until you, yourselves, strike the blow for liberty.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Blow #Race #Liberty

Unite all people of African ancestry of the world to one great body to establish a country and absolute government of their own.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Country #Government #People

We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Men #Mind #Use

That we suffer so much today under whatsoever flag we live is proof positive that constitutions and laws, when framed by the early advocates of human liberty, never included and were never intended for us as a people. It is only a question of sheer accident that we happen to be fellow citizens today with the descendants of those who, through their advocacy, laid the foundation for human rights.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Rights #Law #People

Lift up yourselves, men, take yourselves out of the mire and hitch your hopes to the very stars themselves. Let no man pull you down, let no man destroy your ambition, because man is but your companion, your equal; man is your brother; he is not your Lord, he is not your sovereign master.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Brother #Stars #Ambition

What you do to-day that is worthwhile, inspires others to act at some future time.
-- Marcus Garvey

#African American #Inspire #Words Of Wisdom

We are not engaged in domestic politics, in church building or in social uplift work, but we are engaged in nation building.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Uplifting #Justice #Church

Black men of Carthage, Ethiopia, of Timbuktu and Alexandria gave the likes of civilization to this world
-- Marcus Garvey

#Men #Civilization #Black

A race that is solely dependent upon another for economic existence sooner or later dies. As we have in the past been living upon the mercies shown by others, and by the chances obtainable, and have suffered there from, so we will in the future suffer if an effort is not made now to adjust our own affairs.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Past #Race #Effort

I trust that you will so live today as to realize that you are masters of your own destiny, masters of your fate; if there is anything you want in this world, it is for you to strike out with confidence and faith in self and reach for it.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Fate #Destiny #Self

Take advantage of every opportunity; where there is none, make it for yourself.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Opportunity #Advantage

Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Stars #Wake Up #Ends

Be Black, buy Black, think Black, and all else will take care of itself.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Thinking #Black #Care

You must not mistake lip-service and noise for bravery and service.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Mistake #Bravery #Noise

It is only the belief and the confidence we have in a God why man is able to understand his own social institutions, and move and live like a rational human being.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Moving #Godly #Men

The pen is mightier than the sword, but the tongue is mightier than them both put together.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Together #Tongue #Pens

Slavery is a condition imposed upon individuals or races not sufficiently able to protect or defend themselves, and so long as a race or people expose themselves to the danger of being weak, no one can tell when they will be reduced to slavery.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Race #Long #People

Whatsoever things common to man, that man has done, man can do.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Men #Done #Common

Look to Africa, for there a king will be crowned.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Kings #Looks

There is no force like success, and that is why the individual makes all effort to surround himself throughout life with the evidence of it; as of the individual, so should it be of the nation.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Success #Effort #Individual

Take the kinks out your mind, not your hair.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Hair #Mind #Kink

Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people.
-- Marcus Garvey

#People #Suffering #Chance

The thing to do is to get organized; keep separated and you will be exploited, you will be robbed, you will be killed. Get organized and you will compel the world to respect you.
-- Marcus Garvey

#African American #World #Organized

Present day statesmen are making the biggest blunder of the age if they believe that there can be any peace without equity and justice to all mankind.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Believe #Justice #Age

Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Storm #Looks #Whirlwind

I pray God that we shall never use our physical prowess to oppress the human race, but we will use our strength, physically, morally and otherwise to preserve humanity and civilization.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Race #Civilization #Humanity

History teaches us no race, no people, no nation has ever been freed through cowardice, through cringing, through bowing and scraping, but all that has been achieved to the glory of mankind, to the glory and honour of races and nations was through the manly determination and effort of those who lead and those who are led.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Determination #Race #People

Africa for the Africans... at home and abroad!
-- Marcus Garvey

#Home

I am not opposed to the white race as charged by my enemies. I have no time to hate any one. All my time is devoted to the up-building and development of the Negro Race.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Hate #Race #White

I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Friends #Pride #White

When all else fails to organize the people, conditions will.
-- Marcus Garvey

#People #Failing #Organize

I do not speak carelessly or recklessly but with a definite object of helping the people, especially those of my race, to know, to understand, and to realize themselves.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Race #People #Helping

LIFE is that existence that is given to man to live for a purpose, to live to his own satisfaction and pleasure, providing he forgets not the God who created him and who expects a spiritual obedience and observation of the moral laws that He has inspired.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Spiritual #Inspirational Life #Men

Do not remove the kinks from your hair--remove them from your brain.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Hair #Brain #Kink

There is no humanity before that which starts with yourself.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Humanity

The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Integrity #Selfish #Common

Progress is the attraction that moves humanity.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Moving #Humanity #Progress

History is the land-mark by which we are directed into the true course of life.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Land #History #African American

Up, you mighty race, accomplish what you will.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Race #Accomplish

Government is not infallible. Government is only an executive control, a centralized authority for the purpose of expressing the will of the people; before you have a government you must have the people. Without the people there can be no government. The government must be, therefore, an expression of the will of the people.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Government #Expression #People

Go to work! Go to work in the morn of a new creation... until you have... reached the height of self-progress, and from that pinnacle bestow upon the world a civilization of your own.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Self #Civilization #Black History

I read "Up From Slavery" and then my dream - if I may so call it - of being a race leader dawned.
-- Marcus Garvey

#Dream #Race #Leader