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 BOISTo be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
More W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes
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Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.
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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.
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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.
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The cause of war is preparation for war.
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A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
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.
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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.
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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.
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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






