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 BOISA 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.
More W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes
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Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.
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We cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world is reason, if this ever becomes a reasonable world.
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Whether you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down… Education must not simply teach work – it must teach life.
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Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.
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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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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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Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
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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.
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.
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Education must not simply teach work-it must teach life.
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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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To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
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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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There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
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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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A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself.
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The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?
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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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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 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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For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.
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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.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
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.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.
W. E. B. DU BOIS