W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

116 Sourced Quotes

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
Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.

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
Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.

W. E. B. Du Bois
If the unemployed could eat plans and promises, they would be able to spend the winter on the Riviera.

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 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
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
Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sang; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead: for four hundred years the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God.

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
As I face Africa I ask myself: what is it between us that constitutes a tie which I can feel better than I can explain?

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
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
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
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
We do not countenance violence. Our fight is against violence. We are fighting as we always have fought—for the reign of law over the reign of the mob.

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
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
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
Out of the temptation of Hate, and burned by the fire of Despair, triumphant over Doubt, and steeled by Sacrifice against Humiliation,... He bent to all the gibes and prejudices, to all hatred and discrimination with that rare courtesy which is the armor of pure souls.... he simply worked, inspiring the young, rebuking the old, helping the weak, guiding the strong.

W. E. B. Du Bois
The attempt to make black men American citizens was in a certain sense all a failure, but a splendid failure.

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
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
Today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price oft his is poverty, ignorance and disease oft he majority oft heir fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.

W. E. B. Du Bois