100+ W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “Black Folk Then and Now (The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois): An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race”, p.103, Oxford University Press

Topics: Dark, America, Race, Bleaching, Raphael

The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2012). “Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil”, p.96, Courier Corporation

Topics: Work, Future, Motherhood, Economic Independence

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

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The World and Africa and Color and Democracy”, p.165, Oxford University Press

Topics: Race, Color, Perfect

I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays”, p.222, Oxford University Press

Topics: Men, Carpenter, Objects, True Education

Would America have been America without her Negro people?

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington (2012). “Three African-American Classics: Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, p.329, Courier Corporation

Topics: America, People, Civil Rights, Headstrong

Lord of the springtime, Father of flower, field and fruit, smile on us in these earnest days when the work is heavy and the toil wearisome; lift up our hearts, O God, to the things worthwhile-sunshine and night, the dripping rain, the song of the birds, books and music, and the voices of our friends. Lift up our hearts to these this night and grant us Thy peace. Amen.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (1980). “Prayers for Dark People”

Topics: Song, Spring, Father, Dripping, Books And Music

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.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2013). “Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880”, p.13, Transaction Publishers

Topics: Men, Yellow, Black

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.

source: - W.E.B. Du Bois, Bob Blaisdell (2013). “W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from His Writings”, p.60, Courier Corporation

Topics: Teacher, Teaching, You Like It

Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future world will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it.

Topics: Mean, Men, Race

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?

source: - "The Souls of Black Folk". Book by W. E. B. Du Bois, www.huffingtonpost.com. 1903.

Topics: Children, Other Worlds, Feelings

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

Topics: Winning, World, Facts

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

Topics: Thinking, Issues, Violence

We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of the white oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.

Topics: White, Soul, Oppression

Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (1980). “Prayers for Dark People”

Topics: Beauty, Beautiful, Religion

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

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.49, Oxford University Press

Topics: Government, Leader, Soul, Modern Society

The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.

source: - "The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois". Book edited by Aberjhani, 2003.

Topics: Hurt, People, May, Hurting People

It is the stars, it is the ancient stars, it is the young and everlasting stars!

Topics: Stars, Ancient, Young

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

source: - W.E.B. Du Bois, Bob Blaisdell (2013). “W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from His Writings”, p.160, Courier Corporation

Topics: White, Voting, Black

I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.

Topics: War, School, Sunday, Sunday School

Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “John Brown (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois)”, p.170, Oxford University Press

Topics: Responsibility, Liberty, Firsts

Whiteness is ownership of the earth.

Topics: Earth, Ownership, Whiteness

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.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois' address to his newborn great-grandson on his ninetieth birthday, 1958.

Topics: Life, Work, Bores You

I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life, that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.

Topics: Play, Long, People

How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily.

source: - "The Ordeal of Mansart". Book by W. E. B. Du Bois, 1957.

Topics: Honesty, Integrity, Lying

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.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.74, Oxford University Press

Topics: Men, Progress, Social Justice, Brethren

I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2012). “Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil”, p.1, Courier Corporation

Topics: Believe, Pride, Race, Brother In Law

The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.

source: - "The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois". Book edited by Aberjhani, 2003.

Topics: Magic, Together, World

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. . . .

source: - W.E.B. Du Bois (2013). “W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from His Writings”, p.192, Courier Corporation

Topics: Men, Vision, Doe

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.30, Oxford University Press

Topics: Disappointment, Ignorance, Simple, Deep Disappointment

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!

source: - Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois' speech, www.scotsman.com. October 20, 1946.

Topics: Ignorance, Men, Intelligent

Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.

Topics: Real, Race, Prejudice, Ignorance And Prejudice

How hard a thing is life to the lowly and yet how human and real is it? And all this life and love and strife and failure, - is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day? The answer lies in each of us. For somewhere in your past ... somewhere some 100 years ago?there rose from the smoldering ashes of slavery?a proud and humble family who suffered and struggled with life. A family who found the strength to endure all the indignities of life in America, and that family had the hope for a taste of her bounties in the future.

Topics: Life And Love, Lying, Real, Nightfall, Indignity

Among Negroes of my generation there was not only little direct acquaintance or consciously inherited knowledge of Africa, but much distaste and recoil because of what the white world taught them about the Dark Continent. There arose resentment that a group like ours, born and bred in the United States for centuries, should be regarded as Africans at all. They were, as most of them began gradually to assert, Americans. My father's father was particularly bitter about this. He would not accept an invitation to a 'Negro' picnic. He would not segregate himself in any way.

Topics: Father, Dark, White, Distaste, Recoil

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.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays”, p.61, Oxford University Press

Topics: Inspiring, Country, Religious

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.

Topics: Book, Reading, Science

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.80, Oxford University Press

Topics: Wince

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?

Topics: War, Gunpowder, Steel, Cocoa, Cost Of War

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.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (1988). “Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961”, p.84, Univ of Massachusetts Press

Topics: Prayer, Believe, Men

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.

source: - W.E.B. Du Bois, Vann R. Newkirk II (2017). “The Souls of Black Folk”, p.34, Restless Books

Topics: Stars, Fall, Past

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.

source: - W.E.B. Du Bois, Bob Blaisdell (2013). “W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from His Writings”, p.53, Courier Corporation

Topics: Girl, Real, Boys, Boy And Girl, Black Or White

Half the Christian churches of New York are trying to ruin the free public schools in order to replace them by religious dogma.

Topics: Christian, Religious, New York, Religious Dogma

The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (1988). “Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961”, p.84, Univ of Massachusetts Press

Topics: Intelligent, Men, Atheism

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.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2007). “Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil”, p.119, Cosimo, Inc.

Topics: Children, Thinking, World

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

Topics: Dream, Mean, Reality

So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers.

Topics: Selfish, Learning, Watches, Sneer

Harriet Tubman fought American slavery single handed and was a pioneer in that organized effort known as the Underground Railroad.

Topics: Effort, Pioneers, Railroads, American Slavery, Underground Railroad

If the unemployed could eat plans and promises, they would be able to spend the winter on the Riviera.

Topics: Winter, Promise, Would Be

It is as though nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2016). “The Souls of Black Folk”, p.41, First Avenue Editions

Topics: Men, Order, Giving

The music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2016). “The Souls of Black Folk”, p.209, First Avenue Editions

Topics: Disappointment, Children, People, Unhappy People, Misty

Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born.

Topics: Race, Order, Should Have, Worshippers

Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away.

Topics: Ambition, Rights, People

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.

source: - Interview with Ralph McGill, as quoted in "The Atlantic Monthly", November 1965.

Topics: Opportunity, Men, White Man

Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation, - we have fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this worth the striving? Would America have been America without her Negro People?

Topics: Song, Cheer, Blood, Warp, Smitten

America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.98, Oxford University Press

Topics: Son, Opportunity, America

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.28, Oxford University Press

Topics: Men, Self, African American, Dubois

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.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.138, Oxford University Press

Topics: Strong, Hate, Sacrifice, Pure Soul

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?

source: - W.E.B. Du Bois, Bob Blaisdell (2013). “W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from His Writings”, p.66, Courier Corporation

Topics: Justice, Diversity, Political

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.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.67, Oxford University Press

Topics: College, Goal, Meat

All art is propaganda...I do not care a damn, for any art that is not used for propaganda.

Topics: Art, Care, Propaganda

...in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.113, Oxford University Press

Topics: Country, Blue, Land

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.

source: - "The Souls of Black Folk". Book by W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903.

Topics: Beautiful, Strong, Mean, Honorable Man, Survival Of The Fittest

There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong. Unfortunately, this can seldom be realized in real life; for the very existence of the evil usually argues a moral weakness in the very place where extraordinary moral strength is called for.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America: 1638-1870”, p.195, Courier Corporation

Topics: Crush, Real, Ideas, Moral Strength

The merchant must be no more pessimist than optimist, since pessimism induces him to hold back his capital but optimism induces him to take such risks that he has more to tear than to hope. Abu al'Fadl Ja'far al-Dimishqi (c. 9th century) Arab writer. The Beauties of Commerce Business pays ... philanthropy begs.

Topics: Business, Optimism, Risk

No people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro. The scheme is simple. You knock a man down and then have him arrested for assault. You kill a man and then hang the corpse.

Topics: Men, Simple, People, Present Situation

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell.

Topics: Dream, Hate, Simple, Power Man

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.

Topics: Christian, Character, Years, Christian Education

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

source: - "The Souls of Black Folk".

Topics: Wall, Son, Night

I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.

source: - "The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois". Book edited by Aberjhani, 2003.

Topics: Evil, World, Telling The Truth

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2016). “The Souls of Black Folk”, p.207, First Avenue Editions

Topics: America, Rude, Vigor

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.

source: - "The Talented Tenth" by W.E.B. DuBois, teachingamericanhistory.org. September 1903.

Topics: College, Men, Training

Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly "forgot it" and named their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet.

Topics: Gunpowder, Different, World, World History

The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer.

source: - Darkwater ch. 2 (1920)

Topics: Dark, Long, Justice, Dark World

Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “Dusk of Dawn (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois)”, p.25, Oxford University Press

Topics: Art, Propaganda, Art Is

To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays”, p.67, Oxford University Press

Topics: Real, Doe, Answers

We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.32, Oxford University Press

Topics: Simple, Men, Oasis, Simple Faith, Smartness

We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations, that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leadership, such social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.111, Oxford University Press

Topics: Teaching, Sacrifice, Self, Present Situation

[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.

Topics: Men, Church, Energy

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.

source: - W. E. B. Du Bois (2012). “The Souls of Black Folk”, p.79, Courier Corporation

Topics: Hot, Now And Then, Natural