W.e.b Quotes & Sayings

One ever feels his twoness,
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder. — W.E.B. Du Bois

I read a lot of W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote 'The Souls of Black Folk.' — Andre Holland

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

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

Whiteness is ownership of the earth. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

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

Those whose eyes twenty-five and more years before had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, some - such as Josie, Jim, and Ben - to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their barriers, - barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others - usually the sons of the masters - wish to help him to rise. — W.E.B. Du Bois

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Furthermore, some of the best people in the country were connected with the Communist movement in some way, heroes and heroines one could admire. There was Paul Robeson, the fabulous singer-actor-athlete whose magnificent voice could fill Madison Square Garden, crying out against racial injustice, against fascism. And literary figures (weren't Theodore Dreiser and W. E. B. DuBois Communists?), — Howard Zinn

The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage. — W.E.B. Du Bois

senior officer presumed to be a better judge of — W. E. B. Griffin

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

School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. 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

Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

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

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. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? 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

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. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Education and work are the levers to uplift a people. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

All men cannot go to college, but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have, for the talented few, centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living as to have no aims higher than their bellies and no God greater than Gold. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

This the American Black man knows: his fight is a fight to the finish. Either he dies or he wins. He will enter modern civilization in America as a Black man on terms of perfect and unlimited equality with any white man, or he will enter not at all. Either extermination root and branch or absolute equality. There can be no compromise. This is the last great battle of the west. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

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

The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Position, - for the Negro to realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people, for the white people to realize more vividly than they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice that classes Phillis Wheatley — W.E.B. Du Bois

There is no force equal to a woman determined to rise — W.E.B. Du Bois

The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the cause for further discrimination. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Children learn more from what you are than what you teach. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

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

The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation
of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and
black. — W.E.B. Du Bois

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know. — W.E.B. Du Bois

In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism ... scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity. — David Levering Lewis

3But p sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness q must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. 4Let there be r no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, s which are out of place, but instead t let there be thanksgiving. 5For you may be sure of this, that u everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous ( v that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. 6 w Let no one x deceive you with empty words, for because of these things y the wrath of God comes upon z the sons of disobedience. 7Therefore a do not become partners with them; 8for b at one time you were c darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. d Walk as children of light 9(for e the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), 10and f try to discern — Anonymous

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

With growing exploitation, until they fought slavery to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery. — W.E.B. Du Bois

It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect. Both must change, or neither can improve to any great extent."(p.88) ... "Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in this critical period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph, — W.E.B. Du Bois

What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are 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

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

Among Negroes of my generation there was not only little direct acquaintance or consciously inherited knowledge of Africa, but much distaste and recoil because of what the white world taught them about the Dark Continent. There arose resentment that a group like ours, born and bred in the United States for centuries, should be regarded as Africans at all. They were, as most of them began gradually to assert, Americans. My father's father was particularly bitter about this. He would not accept an invitation to a 'Negro' picnic. He would not segregate himself in any way. — W.E.B. Du Bois

I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves. — W.E.B. Du Bois

They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys. — W.E.B. Du Bois

My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, a vision, we ask not how does he look, but what is his message? ... The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty ... — W.E.B. Du Bois

Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! — W.E.B. Du Bois

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. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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.
"And, John, are you glad you studied?"
"Yes," came the answer, slowly but positively.
She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully,
"I wish I was unhappy, - and - and," putting both arms about
his neck, "I think I am, a little, John. — W.E.B. Du Bois

The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. — W.E.B. Du Bois

And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough one-ness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force. — W.E.B. Du Bois

In any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand. — W.E.B. Du Bois

The price of culture is a Lie. — W.E.B. Du Bois

He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

All life long crying without avail, As the water all night long is crying to me. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense. — W.E.B. Du Bois

We are training not isolated men but a living group of men, - nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, - not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for the lory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame. And all this is gained only by human strife and longing; by ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness and Truth on the unhampered search for Truth ... and weaving thus a system, not a distortion, and bringing a birth, not an abortion. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

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

Before and after emancipation, the Negro, in self-defense, was propelled toward the white employer. The endowments of wealthy white men have developed great institutions of learning for the Negro, but the freedom of action on the part of these same universities has been curtailed in proportion as they are indebted to white philanthropies. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

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. — W.E.B. Du Bois

I was born free. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again? — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

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

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

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

its police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police. — W.E.B. Du Bois

To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires. — W.E.B. Du Bois

When now we turn and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes, - two of blacks and three of whites; and in one of the houses of the whites a worthless black boy was harbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for rape. And here, too, is the high whitewashed fence of the "stockade," as the county prison is called; the white folks say it is ever full of black criminals, - the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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

We have come to a generation which seeks advance without ideals - discovery without stars. — W.E.B. Du Bois

The United States succeeded by State action in prohibiting the slave-trade from 1798 to 1803, in furthering the cause of abolition, and in preventing the fitting out of slave-trade expeditions in United States ports. The country had good cause to congratulate itself. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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! — W.E.B. Du Bois

My own military background is wholly un-distinguished. I was a sergeant. — W. E. B. Griffin

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? — W.E.B. Du Bois

From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities. — W.E.B. Du Bois

For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul. — W.E.B. Du Bois

According to tradition, the originator of Taoism, Lao-tzu, was an older contemporary of Kung Fu-tzu, or Confucius, who died in 479 B.C.1 Lao-tzu is said to have been the author of the Tao Te Ching, a short book of aphorisms, setting forth the principles of the Tao and its power or virtue (Te e). But traditional Chinese philosophy ascribes both Taoism and Confucianism to a still earlier source, to a work which lies at the very foundation of Chinese thought and culture, dating anywhere from 3000 to 1200 B.C. This is the I Ching, or Book of Changes. — Alan W. Watts

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. — W.E.B. Du Bois

He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. — W.E.B. Du Bois

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. — W.E.B. Du Bois

If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois's famous words, "the problem of the color line," then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification. — Naomi Murakawa

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

It can be safely asserted that since early Colonial times, the North has had a distinct race problem. Every one of these States had slaves, and at the beginning of Washington's Administration, there were 40,000 black slaves and 17,000 black freemen in this section. — W.E.B. Du Bois

A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect — W.E.B. Du Bois

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. — W.E.B. Du Bois