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 BOISThere is no force equal to a woman determined to rise.
More W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes
-
-
We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of the white oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
Education must not simply teach work-it must teach life.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
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.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
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.
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 -
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 -
There is no force equal to a woman determined to rise.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
As Negro voting increased, Congress got an improved sense of hearing.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
It is the wind and the rain, O God, the cold and the storm that make this earth of yours to blossom and bear its fruit. So in our lives it is storm and stress and hurt and suffering that make real men and women bring the world’s work to its highest perfection.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
There may often be excuse for doing things poorly in this world, but there is never any excuse for calling a poorly done thing, well done.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
It is the stars, it is the ancient stars, it is the young and everlasting stars!
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
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.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
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 -
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 -
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
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 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 problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
W. E. B. DU BOIS -
There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even peace.
W. E. B. DU BOIS