44 quotes
Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
John Brown: A Biography (1909)
I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.
The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003)
The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.
The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003)
Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
Niagara Movement Speech (1905)
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.
The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003)
The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.
To have given each one of the million Negro free families a forty-acre freehold would have made a basis of real democracy in the United States that might easily have transformed the modern world.
Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
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.
The Negro (1915)
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
The cause of war is preparation for war.
Darkwater (1920)
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.
The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger.
The most ordinary Negro is a distinct gentleman, but it takes extraordinary training and opportunity to make the average white man anything but a hog.
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.
The Negro (1915)
Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
John Brown: A Biography (1909)
And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature needs must make men narrow in order to give them force.
The Souls of Black Folk (1903)