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 BOISWe cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world is reason, if this ever becomes a reasonable world.
More W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes
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Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground.
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 -
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 -
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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When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.
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.
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There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.
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 -
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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Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
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I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters 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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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