Top 100 W.e.b Quotes
#1. If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois's famous words, "the problem of the color line," then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification.
Naomi Murakawa
#2. I read a lot of W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote 'The Souls of Black Folk.'
Andre Holland
#3. In his book The Soul of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois writes about always feeling his twoness
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; to warring ideals in one dark body.
Ron Suskind
#4. You can ascend to the region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. The shelter that received the risen Christ and Port in The Sheltering Sky, that comforted the mortally wounded Prince Andrei and the young W. E. B. Du Bois.
Nell Zink
#5. g*d wept, but that mattered little to an unbelieving age ... for there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism & a new enslavement of labor" --w.e.b. dubois
Debois
#6. A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#7. 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
#8. In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and faith. All words and all thinking lead to the child, - to that vast immortality and wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child represents.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. I believe that all men, black, brown, and white, are brothers.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#13. In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#14. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#15. 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
#16. Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#17. The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#18. A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#19. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#20. From this we may conclude that it behooves nations as well as men to do things at the very moment when they ought to be done.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#21. Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#22. 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
#23. The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense,
else what shall save us from a second slavery?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#27. It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disenfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#28. 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
#29. I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#30. It is the stars, it is the ancient stars, it is the young and everlasting stars!
W.E.B. Du Bois
#31. High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#32. Would America have been America without her Negro people?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#37. There may often be excuse for doing things poorly in this world, but there is never any excuse for calling a poorly done thing, well done.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#38. 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
#40. All life long crying without avail, As the water all night long is crying to me.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#41. My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#42. For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#44. There is no force equal to a woman determined to rise
W.E.B. Du Bois
#45. But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#46. Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#47. [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
#48. Only in the chamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thing - a childless mother.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#49. Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#50. It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#51. 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
#52. The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, 'What else are women for?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#53. 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
#54. Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#55. 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
#56. Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#57. Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#58. War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery, - this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law. Nor
W.E.B. Du Bois
#59. I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#65. The stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring: What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women and children?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#66. That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#67. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced in microcosm, all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice and social condition.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#72. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#73. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#74. 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
#75. Negroes could be sold - actually sold as we sell cattle, with no reference to calves or bulls or recognition of family. It was a nasty business. The white South was properly ashamed of it and continually belittled and almost denied it. But it was a stark and bitter fact.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#76. It can be safely asserted that since early Colonial times, the North has had a distinct race problem. Every one of these States had slaves, and at the beginning of Washington's Administration, there were 40,000 black slaves and 17,000 black freemen in this section.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#77. ze a n d st y le . A q u ic k lo o k sh o w s th a t th is fa b u lo u s g re e n su e d e $300 va lue Miu Miu b e lt is o nly $59 a nd this le a the r G uc c i to te for $199! Forg et
Anonymous
#78. At best, the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#79. Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#81. My own military background is wholly un-distinguished. I was a sergeant.
W. E. B. Griffin
#82. Denmark first responded to the denunciatory cries of the eighteenth century against slavery and the slave-trade. In 1792, by royal order, this traffic was prohibited in the Danish possessions after 1802.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#83. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. If you want to feel humor too exquisite and subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#87. 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
#88. Education must not simply teach work - it must teach Life.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#89. Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. ..this noticeable in the South, where theology
and religious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North, and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of Negro thought and methods.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#94. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#95. And yet not a dream, but a mighty reality- a glimpse of the higher life, the broader possibilities of humanity, which is granted to the man who, amid the rush and roar of living, pauses four short years to learn what living means
W.E.B. Du Bois
#96. [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
#98. A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cotton-fields. This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom
the shadow of a marvelous dream.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#99. 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
#100. 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
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