Top 150 W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

Featured in: Ignorance Quotes

2. “There is no force equal to a woman determined to rise.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

3. “Education must not simply teach work-it must teach life.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

Featured in: Encouraging Quotes for Students, Teaching Quotes

4. “Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

Featured in: Influence Quotes, Quotes About Childhood

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

6. “A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

8. “Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

9. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

10. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

11. “Ignorance is a cure for nothing.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

12. “The cause of war is preparation for war.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

13. “The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

14. “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

15. “The most important thing to remember is this: to be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

16. “A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

17. “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

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

Featured in: Real Quotes

20. “Herein lies the tragedy of the age: Not that men are poor, – all men know something of poverty. Not that men are wicked, – who is good? Not that men are ignorant, – what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

24. “One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

25. “Begin with art, because art tries to take us outside ourselves. It is a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and context so conversation can flow back and forth and we can be influenced by each other.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

27. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

28. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

29. “Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody’s slavery.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

31. “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 in the possibility of infinite development.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

33. “I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

34. “We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong – this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

35. “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

36. “In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

37. “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

38. “Men must not only know, they must act.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

39. “Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stands up and protests. The protest need not be merely physical-the throwing of stones and bullets-if it is mental, spiritual; if it expresses itself in silent, persistent dissatisfaction, the cost to the oppressor is terrific.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

41. “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

42. “How shall Integrity face Oppression?”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

47. “And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick mason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, not sordid money-getting... The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not fame.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

48. “In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

49. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

Featured in: Real Quotes

50. “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