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 BOISThe kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.
More W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes
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Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem?
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 -
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 -
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 -
Would America have been America without her Negro people?
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
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 -
But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell:the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears; the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
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 -
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 -
Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
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 cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
W. E. B. DU BOIS