W.E.B. Du Bois Quotes

A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself

There may often be excuse for doing things poorly in this world, but there is never any excuse for calling a poorly done thing, well done.

Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.

Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage.

There is no force equal to a woman determined to rise

From this we may conclude that it behooves nations as well as men to do things at the very moment when they ought to be done.

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

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

Would America have been America without her Negro people?

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

Education must not simply teach work - it must teach Life.

I believe that all men, black, brown, and white, are brothers.

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

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

If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they have not often let their presence be known.

Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.

The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.

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

Whiteness is ownership of the earth.

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

For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.

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

Liberty trains for liberty.

The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.

Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.

How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!

Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.

But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.

Education and work are the levers to uplift a people.

Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.

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

Only in the chamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thing - a childless mother.

Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.

With growing exploitation, until they fought slavery to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery.

As a race, the Negroes are not lazy.

Men must not only know, they must act.

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.

My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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.

The "Paz" was an armed slaver flying the American flag.

its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police.

I was born free.

The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense,
else what shall save us from a second slavery?

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

In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.

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

The cause of war is preparation for war.

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

Education is the development of power and ideal.

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

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

Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches men, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.

He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.

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

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

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.

Rich and bitter depth of their experience, the

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

As Negro voting increased, Congress got an improved sense of hearing.

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

I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.

North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.

I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the veil.

The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, 'What else are women for?

My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution.

A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect

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

If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?

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

Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.

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.

Ignorance is a cure for nothing.

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.

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

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

We have come to a generation which seeks advance without ideals - discovery without stars.

I had a happy childhood and acceptance in the community.

Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.

I am a Bolshevik.

It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana.

Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.

If you want to feel humor too exquisite and subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers.

A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.

To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.

Then, as the storm burst round him, he
rose slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes toward the Sea.
And the world whistled in his ears.

I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too.

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

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

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.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.

The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.

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.

Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.

The price of culture is a Lie.

All life long crying without avail, As the water all night long is crying to me.

[C] an any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly become he were of wood and drawers of water?