Top 150 W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

52. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

54. “It is the wind and the rain, O God, the cold and the storm that make this earth of yours to blossom and bear its fruit. So in our lives it is storm and stress and hurt and suffering that make real men and women bring the world’s work to its highest perfection.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

56. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

58. “The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

59. “The price of culture is a Lie.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

60. “The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

61. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

62. “The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin – the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

63. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

64. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

65. “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?”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

66. “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

67. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

68. “He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance, – not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

69. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

70. “All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

71. “It is the stars, it is the ancient stars, it is the young and everlasting stars!”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

73. “The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

75. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

77. “In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself, – darkly as through a veil;.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

78. “South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

79. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

81. “The favorite device of the devil, ancient and modern, is to force a human being into a more or less artificial class, accuse the class of unnamed and unnameable sin, and then damn any individual in the alleged class, however innocent he may be.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

82. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

84. “Whiteness is ownership of the earth.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

85. “Eastward and westward storms are breaking, – great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

86. “The tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

87. “Life treads on life, and heart on heart; We press too close in church and mart To keep a dream or grave apart. MRS. BROWNING.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

88. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

89. “Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and kindergartens, industrial and technical schools, literature and tolerance, – all these spring from knowledge and culture, the children of the university. So must men and nations build, not otherwise, not upside down.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

90. “But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

91. “A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

92. “The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence, – else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek, – the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

94. “I shirk not. I long for work. I pant for a life full of striving. I am no coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail before the awful shadow of the Veil. But hearken, O Death! Is not this my life hard enough, – is not that dull land that stretches its sneering web about me cold enough, – is not all the world beyond these four little walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter here, – thou, O Death?”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

95. “Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living – Liberty, Justice, and Right – is marked “For White People Only.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

97. “For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged, – wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the “cracker” Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

98. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

99. “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

100. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois