The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
W. E. B. DU BOISThe 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.
More W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.
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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.
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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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Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody’s slavery.
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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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To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
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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One ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
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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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There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
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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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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 -
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