Words matter. These are the best W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Education and work are the levers to uplift a people.
It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana.
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.
My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.
If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?
St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet – as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud.
I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.
The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.
These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, – a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.
Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools – intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it – this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.
I was born free.
If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, they are doomed for all time. It is not a case of ethics; it is a plain case of necessity. The method by which this may be done is, first, for the American Negro to achieve a new economic solidarity.
Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.
The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women’s suffrage.
All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
Education is the development of power and ideal.
What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!
Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.
Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.
North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.
For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word ‘slave’ is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment.
The ruling of men is the effort to direct the individual actions of many persons toward some end. This end theoretically should be the greatest good of all, but no human group has ever reached this ideal because of ignorance and selfishness.
I am a Bolshevik.
My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line: the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.
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.
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.
Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.
In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.
A system of education is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter of schools. Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.
How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!
Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.
