Top 100 W.E.B. Du Bois Quotes
#1. There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#3. Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#4. When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#5. I believe that all men, black, brown, and white, are brothers.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#6. I believe that there are human stocks with whom it is physically unwise to intermarry, but to think that these stocks are all colored or that there are no such white stocks is unscientific and false.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#7. A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#8. Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#9. And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough one-ness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#10. And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem. Human advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of sympathy and cooperation among classes who would scorn charity.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#11. The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#12. The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense,
else what shall save us from a second slavery?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#13. One ever feels his twoness,
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#14. Would America have been America without her Negro people?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#15. Begin with art, because art tries to take us outside ourselves. It is a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and context so conversation can flow back and forth and we can be influenced by each other.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#16. But what of black women? ... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#17. The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#18. I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#20. All life long crying without avail, As the water all night long is crying to me.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#21. My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#22. There is no force equal to a woman determined to rise
W.E.B. Du Bois
#23. Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#24. [We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#25. Only in the chamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thing - a childless mother.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#26. Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#27. It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#28. I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the veil.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#29. Comrade, you and I can never be satisfied with sitting down before a great human problem and saying nothing can be done. We must do something. That is the reason we are here on Earth.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#30. Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#31. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation
of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and
black.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#32. Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#33. But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell:the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears; the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#35. The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#36. All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#38. The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world's need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this - with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need - this life is hell.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#39. A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#40. The hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#41. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#42. And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, - all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, - who is good? not that men are ignorant, - what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men. He
W.E.B. Du Bois
#43. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#44. obliteration of the Negro home. A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#45. The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the cause for further discrimination.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#46. The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#47. Education must not simply teach work - it must teach Life.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#48. Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#49. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#50. The favorite device of the devil, ancient and modern, is to force a human being into a more or less artificial class, accuse the class of unnamed and unnameable sin, and then damn any individual in the alleged class, however innocent he may be.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#51. [I] the is the duty of black men to judge the Southern discriminate lyrics. The present generation of Southerners are not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#53. The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#54. We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of the white oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#55. When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, a vision, we ask not how does he look, but what is his message? ... The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty ...
W.E.B. Du Bois
#56. Half the Christian churches of New York are trying to ruin the free public schools in order to replace them by religious dogma.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#57. the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. Immigrants
W.E.B. Du Bois
#58. The white economic and political elite often failed to recognize blacks as American, just as blacks often failed to recognize their potential for advancement outside of the limited opportunities afforded them by whites.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#59. its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#60. Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their especial aid.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#61. Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future will, in all reasonable possibility, be what colored men make of it.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#62. But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#63. The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#64. The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#65. Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#66. Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#67. Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#68. Education and work are the levers to uplift a people.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#69. With growing exploitation, until they fought slavery to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#70. Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage ground.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#71. The United States succeeded by State action in prohibiting the slave-trade from 1798 to 1803, in furthering the cause of abolition, and in preventing the fitting out of slave-trade expeditions in United States ports. The country had good cause to congratulate itself.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#72. Cannot the nation that has absorbed ten million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#73. Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stands up and protests. The protest need not be merely physical-the throwing of stones and bullets-if it is mental, spiritual; if it expresses itself in silent, persistent dissatisfaction, the cost to the oppressor is terrific.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#74. What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!
W.E.B. Du Bois
#75. The ruling of men is the effort to direct the individual actions of many persons toward some end. This end theoretically should be the greatest good of all, but no human group has ever reached this ideal because of ignorance and selfishness.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#76. To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#77. The most ordinary Negro is a distinct gentleman, but it takes extraordinary training and opportunity to make the average white man anything but a hog.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#78. There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#79. In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#80. Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#81. We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong - this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#82. Then, as the storm burst round him, he
rose slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes toward the Sea.
And the world whistled in his ears.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#83. What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#84. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#86. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#87. If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#88. The "Paz" was an armed slaver flying the American flag.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#89. Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#90. Harriet Tubman fought American slavery single handed and was a pioneer in that organized effort known as the Underground Railroad.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#91. Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs,--needs it for the sake of own white sons and so daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental and moral development.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#92. A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself
W.E.B. Du Bois
#93. [C] an any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly become he were of wood and drawers of water?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#94. The Negro was freed and turned loose as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. Ninety-nine per cent were field hands and servants of the lowest class.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#95. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute - this is the only way of human life.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#96. If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, they are doomed for all time. It is not a case of ethics; it is a plain case of necessity. The method by which this may be done is, first, for the American Negro to achieve a new economic solidarity.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#97. The true college will ever have but one goal - not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#98. Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#99. If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they have not often let their presence be known.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#100. It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its own kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.
W.E.B. Du Bois
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