W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

115 Sourced Quotes

Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a 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
And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature needs must make men narrow in order to give them force.

W. E. B. Du Bois
The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin—the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world.

W. E. B. Du Bois
The severest charge that can be brought against the Christian education of the Negro in the South during the last thirty years is the reckless way in which sap-headed young fellows, without ability, and, in some cases, without character, have been urged and pushed into the ministry.

W. E. B. Du Bois
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!

W. E. B. Du Bois
To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.

W. E. B. Du Bois
We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.

W. E. B. Du Bois
All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and
befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold.

W. E. B. Du Bois
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men and women of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of the races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and imprudence and cruelty.

W. E. B. Du Bois
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem? To have your very body and the bodies of your children to be assume to be criminal, violent, malignant.

W. E. B. Du Bois
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.

W. E. B. Du Bois
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
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
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
Whether you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down... Education must not simply teach work - it must teach life.

W. E. B. Du Bois
Save us World Spirit from our lesser selves!
Grant us that war and hatred cease,
Reveal our souls in every race and hue!
Help us, O Human God, in this thy truce
To make Humanity divine.

W. E. B. Du Bois
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
The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?

W. E. B. Du Bois
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
I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.

W. E. B. Du Bois
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
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
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.

W. E. B. Du Bois
Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.

W. E. B. Du Bois
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