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.
W. E. B. DU BOISWhether 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.
More W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes
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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.
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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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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There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even peace.
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Ignorance is a cure for nothing.
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Men must not only know, they must act.
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The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.
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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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It is the stars, it is the ancient stars, it is the young and everlasting stars!
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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.
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.
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Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done.
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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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Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
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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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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.
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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 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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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 -
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 -
Life has its pains and evils-its bitter disappointments; but like a good novel and in healthful length of days, there is infinite joy in seeing the World, the most interesting of continued stories, unfold.
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I believe that all men, black and brown, and white, are brothers, varying, through Time and Opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibility of infinite development.
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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.
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Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future world will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it.
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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 theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.
W. E. B. DU BOIS