Marcus Garvey's father had an extensive library in his home and as a boy, Marcus spent countless hours reading every book he could dig his nose into. Garvey's ideas were definitely BIG, grand, outside the box, imaginative. His Pan-African thinking was so far advanced for his time. For example, he imagined an African Union before there was such a thing and dreamed of the motherland being developed by Africans, at home and abroad.
Moral of the story: Read! And start a library for your youth.
| "Read!" Marcus Garvey instructed. |
"Use every spare minute you have in reading. If you are going on a journey that would take you an hour carry something with you to read for that hour until you have reached the place. If you are sitting down waiting for somebody, have something in your Pocket to read until the person comes. Don't waste time. Any time you think you have to waste put it in reading something. Carry with you a small pocket dictionary and study words whilst waiting or travelling, or a small pocket volume on some particular subject. Read through at least one book every week separate and distinct from your newspapers and journals. "
"Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden."
"The greatest men and women in the world burn the midnight lamp. That is to say, when their neighbours and household are gone to bed, they are reading, studying and thinking. When they rise in the morning they are always ahead of their neighbours and their household in the thing that they were studying[,] reading and thinking of. A daily repetition of that will carry them daily ahead and above their neighbours and household. Practise this rule. It is wise to study a couple of subjects at a time. As for instance a little geography, a little psychology, a little ethics, a little theology, a little philosophy, a little mathematics, a little science on which a sound academic education is built."
"One must never stop reading. Read every thing that you can that is of standard knowledge. Don't waste time reading trashy literature... The idea is that personal experience is not enough for a human to get all the useful knowledge of life, because the individual life is too short, so we must feed on the experience of others."
"Read History incessantly until you master it, This means your own national history, the history of the world - social history industrial history and the history of the different sciences; but primarily the history of man. If you do not know what went on before you came here and what is happening at the time you live, but away from you, you will not know the world and will be ignorant of the world and mankind."
"A reading man or woman is a ready man or woman; but a writing man or woman is exact."
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