W.E.B. Du Bois Quotes
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.
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.
The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.
Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.
Half the Christian churches of New York are trying to ruin the free public schools in order to replace them by religious dogma.
I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.
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?
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.
Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us.
We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.
All art is propaganda...I do not care a damn, for any art that is not used for propaganda.
I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.
If you want to feel humor too exquisite and subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers.
America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.
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.
The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer.
If the unemployed could eat plans and promises, they would be able to spend the winter on the Riviera.
I believe that there are human stocks with whom it is physically unwise to intermarry, but to think that these stocks are all colored or that there are no such white stocks is unscientific and false.
The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.
I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.
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.
Romance this moment, this hour, this day. String moments together like pearls on a rope.
It seems strange to me that mechanical progress always seems to leave the slower demands of elegance far behind.
Eastward and westward storms are breaking, --great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable.
Don't wait till tomorrow to achieve your goals, live in the present and look forward to the future. Forget yesterday and start living today.
In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.
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.
No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute - this is the only way of human life.
Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.
