W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes
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North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.
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How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!
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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.
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The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.
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I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.
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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.
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Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.
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After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.
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Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
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Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue? - for brown were his father’s eyes, and his father’s father’s. And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.
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An American, a Negro... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
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The cause of war is preparation for war.
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St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud.
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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.
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But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
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Education is the development of power and ideal.
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There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even peace.
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Human nature is not simple and any classification that roughly divides men into good and bad, superior and inferior, slave and free, is and must be ludicrously untrue and universally dangerous as a permanent exhaustive classification.
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Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid; and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease!
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Life has its pains and evils-its bitter disappointments; but like a good novel and in healthful length of days, there is infinite joy in seeing the World, the most interesting of continued stories, unfold.
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The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.
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The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line: the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.
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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.
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I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.