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 BOISThe problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
More W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes
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Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
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The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
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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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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.
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We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong – this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.
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The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
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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.
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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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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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Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.
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The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
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Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
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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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Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
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The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.
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Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us.
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I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.
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The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.
W. E. B. DU BOIS