Top 150 W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “Comrade, you and I can never be satisfied with sitting down before a great human problem and saying nothing can be done. We must do something. That is the reason we are here on Earth.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

105. “It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disenfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

106. “Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head, – some way.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

107. “And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem. Human advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of sympathy and cooperation among classes who would scorn charity.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

108. “Golden apples are beautiful–I remember the lawless days of boyhood, when orchards in crimson and gold tempted me over fence and field–and, too, the merchant who has dethroned the planter is no despicable parvenu.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

109. “So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of their right to demand it. This is the tangle of thought and afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men for life. Behind.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

110. “The white economic and political elite often failed to recognize blacks as American, just as blacks often failed to recognize their potential for advancement outside of the limited opportunities afforded them by whites.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

112. “They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

115. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

116. “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.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

117. “Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future will, in all reasonable possibility, be what colored men make of it.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

119. “The hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched, – criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, – this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

120. “John,” she said, “does it make every one – unhappy when they study and learn lots of things?” He paused and smiled. “I am afraid it does,” he said.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

121. “Thus 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. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

122. “How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure, – is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

123. “I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

125. “The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, and adjustment which forms the secret of civilisation.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

126. “Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

127. “Only in the chamber of death writhed the world’s most piteous thing – a childless mother.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

128. “The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this – with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need – this life is hell.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

129. “So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

130. “Liberty trains for liberty.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

131. “In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches, – one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and streetcars.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

132. “A university is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation, through the training of quick minds and pure hearts, and for this work no other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

133. “The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

135. “Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men?”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

136. “It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its own kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

137. “And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud, – and behold the suicide of a race!”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

138. “It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

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

— W. E. B. Du Bois

140. “They have, to be sure, their proportion of ne’er-do-weels, their pedants and lettered fools, but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have not that culture of manner which we instinctively associate with university men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from cultured homes, and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape a certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

141. “You will not wonder at his weird pilgrimage,-who who in the swift whifl of living, amid its cold paradox and marvelous vision, have fronted life and aked its riddle face to face. And if you find that riddle hard to read, remember that yonder black boy finds it just a little harder; if it is difficult for you to find and face your duty, it is a shade more difficult for him; if your heart sickens in the blood and dust of battle, remember that to him the dust is thicker and the battle fiercer.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

142. “War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery, – this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law. Nor.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

143. “Not for me, – I shall die in my bonds, – but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not “Is he white?” but “Can he work?” When men ask artists, not “Are they black?” but “Do they know?”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

144. “Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs, – needs it for the sake of own white sons and so daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental and moral development.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

145. “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

146. “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne;.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

147. “Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men?”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

148. “That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

149. “We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function of government, of individual worth and possibilities, – of nearly all those things which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from learning.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois

150. “The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.”

— W. E. B. Du Bois