W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

115 Sourced Quotes

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
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
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

W. E. B. Du Bois
It is the wind and the rain, O God, the cold and the storm that make this earth of yours to blossom and bear its fruit. So in our lives it is storm and stress and hurt and suffering that make real men and women bring the world's work to its highest perfection.

W. E. B. Du Bois
It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.

W. E. B. Du Bois
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
Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.

W. E. B. Du Bois
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
While it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope for great success.

W. E. B. Du Bois
Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live, — a Negro and a Negro's son. Holding in that little head — ah, bitterly! — the unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand — ah, wearily! — to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty is a lie.

W. E. B. Du Bois
Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, - this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society

W. E. B. Du Bois
We cannot refuse to cooperate with white Americans and simultaneously demand the right to cooperate!

W. E. B. Du Bois
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
To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

W. E. B. Du Bois
We cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world is reason, if this ever becomes a reasonable world.

W. E. B. Du Bois
Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.

W. E. B. Du Bois
Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy and consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.

W. E. B. Du Bois
There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even peace.

W. E. B. Du Bois
The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon Hell and Damnation-upon an attempt to scare people into being decent and threatening them with the terrors of death and punishment. We are still trained to believe a good deal that is simply childish in theology. The outward and visible punishment of every wrong deed that men do the repeated declaration that anything can be gotten by anyone at any time by prayer.

W. E. B. Du Bois
One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.

W. E. B. Du Bois
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.

W. E. B. Du Bois
Would America have been America without her Negro people?

W. E. B. Du Bois
Unless modern civilization is a failure, it is entirely feasible and practicable for two races in such essential political, economic and religious harmony as the white and colored people in America, to develop side by side in peace and mutual happiness, the peculiar contribution which each has to make to the culture of their common country.

W. E. B. Du Bois
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
I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.

W. E. B. Du Bois