W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• Whiteness is ownership of the earth.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Earth, Ownership, Whiteness

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Believe, Long

  Last message (written 26 June, 1957) read at his funeral, 1963, in Journal of Negro History Apr. 1964

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Work, Bores You

  W. E. B. Du Bois' address to his newborn great-grandson on his ninetieth birthday, 1958.

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• How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Honesty, Integrity, Lying

  "The Ordeal of Mansart". Book by W. E. B. Du Bois, 1957.

  30 Copy quote

• I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life, that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Play, Long, People

  9 Copy quote

• A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Book, Writing, Classic

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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

  Men, Progress, Social Justice

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.74, Oxford University Press

  11 Copy quote

• The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Magic, Together, World

  "The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois". Book edited by Aberjhani, 2003.

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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.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Believe, Pride, Race

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2012). “Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil”, p.1, Courier Corporation

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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

  Men, Vision, Doe

  W.E.B. Du Bois (2013). “W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from His Writings”, p.192, Courier Corporation

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• The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Disappointment, Ignorance, Simple

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.30, Oxford University Press

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• But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Art, Sunset, Color

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2011). “Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept”, p.147, Transaction Publishers

  32 Copy quote

• I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Believe, Men, Space

  W.E.B. Du Bois (2013). “W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from His Writings”, p.62, Courier Corporation

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• Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid; and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease!

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Ignorance, Men, Intelligent

  Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois' speech, www.scotsman.com. October 20, 1946.

  22 Copy quote

• Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Real, Race, Prejudice

  9 Copy quote

• How hard a thing is life to the lowly and yet how human and real is it? And all this life and love and strife and failure, - is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day? The answer lies in each of us. For somewhere in your past ... somewhere some 100 years ago?there rose from the smoldering ashes of slavery?a proud and humble family who suffered and struggled with life. A family who found the strength to endure all the indignities of life in America, and that family had the hope for a taste of her bounties in the future.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Life And Love, Lying, Real

  32 Copy quote

• I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Wince

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois”, p.80, Oxford University Press

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• Among Negroes of my generation there was not only little direct acquaintance or consciously inherited knowledge of Africa, but much distaste and recoil because of what the white world taught them about the Dark Continent. There arose resentment that a group like ours, born and bred in the United States for centuries, should be regarded as Africans at all. They were, as most of them began gradually to assert, Americans. My father's father was particularly bitter about this. He would not accept an invitation to a 'Negro' picnic. He would not segregate himself in any way.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Father, Dark, White

  35 Copy quote

• 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

  Lying, Knowledge, Men

  The Souls of Black Folk ch. 12 (1903)

  26 Copy quote

• Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Country, Lynching, Civilization

  "Reconstruction and Africa" (1919)

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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

  Book, Reading, Science

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• Unless modern civilization is a failure, it is entirely feasible and practicable for two races in such essential political, economic and religious harmony as the white and colored people in America, to develop side by side in peace and mutual happiness, the peculiar contribution which each has to make to the culture of their common country.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Inspiring, Country, Religious

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays”, p.61, Oxford University Press

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• What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  War, Gunpowder, Steel

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• The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon Hell and Damnation-upon an attempt to scare people into being decent and threatening them with the terrors of death and punishment. We are still trained to believe a good deal that is simply childish in theology. The outward and visible punishment of every wrong deed that men do the repeated declaration that anything can be gotten by anyone at any time by prayer.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Prayer, Believe, Men

  W. E. B. Du Bois (1988). “Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961”, p.84, Univ of Massachusetts Press

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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.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Stars, Fall, Past

  W.E.B. Du Bois, Vann R. Newkirk II (2017). “The Souls of Black Folk”, p.34, Restless Books

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