“my only desire is to teach the word o' man and leave the word o' Gawd to the pulpit men”

“what is a german? to say a man is a german, what is that? does it tell you if he is a good man? or a bad man? no, my friend, it tells you nothing about a man to say he is german. a man must think what he is inside. what he is on the outside, how can this matter?”

“In teaching me independence of thought, they had given me the greatest gift an adult can give to a child besides love, and they had given me that also.”

“. . . God is too busy making the sun come up and go down and watching so the moon floats just right in the sky to be concerned with color . . . only man wants always God should be there to condemn this one and save that one. Always it is man who wants to make heaven and hell. God is too busy training the bees to make honey and every morning opening up all the new flowers for business.”

“When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win.”

“It's not what a man does, it's what a man is that counts!”

“I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people to form the three waterfalls in the night country.”