W. E. B. Du Bois quotes - page 2

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)
The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
I believe in God who made of one blood all races that dwell on earth. 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. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
The Soviet Union does not allow any church of any kind to interfere with education, and religion is not taught in public schools. It seems to me that this is the greatest gift of the Russian Revolution to the modern world. Most educated modern men no longer believe in religious dogma. If questioned they will usually resort to double-talk before admitting the fact. But who today actually believes that this world is ruled and directed by a benevolent person of great power who, on humble appeal, will change the course of events at our request? Who believes in miracles? Many folk follow religious ceremonies and services and allow their children to learn fairy tales and so-called religious truth, which in time the children come to recognize as conventional lies told by their parents and teachers for the children's good. One can hardly exaggerate the moral disaster of the custom. We have to thank the Soviet Union for the courage to stop it. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
A 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. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
But what of black women?... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire. View quote
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. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they have not often let their presence be known. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, - this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society. (W. E. B. Du Bois)
But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
Ignorance is a cure for nothing. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
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? View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
How shall Integrity face Oppression? View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, 'What else are women for? View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American... View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
Human nature is not simple and any classification that roughly divides men into good and bad, superior and inferior, slave and free, is and must be ludicrously untrue and universally dangerous as a permanent exhaustive classification. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly: "But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen! Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionately to believe such an extraordinary dictum as this? That nations are coming to believe it is manifest daily. Wave on wave, each with increasing virulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time. Its first effects are funny: the strut of the Southerner, the arrogance of the Englishman amuck, the whoop of the hoodlum who vicariously leads your mob. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
The Negro slave trade was the first step in modern world commerce, followed by the modern theory of colonial expansion. Slaves as an article of commerce were shipped as long as the traffic paid. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
The men of the Niagara Movement coming from the toil of the year's hard work and pausing a moment from the earning of their daily bread turn toward the nation and again ask in the name of ten million the privilege of a hearing. In the last year the work of the Negro hater has flourished in the land. Step by step the defenders of the rights of American citizens have retreated. The work of stealing the black man's ballot has progressed and the fifty and more representatives of stolen votes still sit in the nation's capital. Discrimination in travel and public accommodation has so spread the some of our weaker brethren are actually afraid to thunder against color discrimination as such and are simply whispering for ordinary decencies. (W. E. B. Du Bois)
It is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity's God. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
The difference of development, North and South, is explained as a sort of working out of cosmic social and economic law. ... In this sweeping mechanistic interpretation, there is no room for the real plot of the story, for the clear mistake and guilt of building a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
The first attempt of a democracy which includes the previously disfranchised poor is to redistribute wealth and income, and this is exactly what the black South attempted. The theory is that the wealth and the current income of the wealthy ruling class does not belong to them entirely, but is the product of the work and striving of the great millions; and that, therefore, these millions ought to have a voice in its more equitable distribution; and if this is true in modern countries, like France and England and Germany, how much more true was it in the South after the war where the poorest class represented the most extreme case of theft of labor that the world can conceive; namely, chattel slavery? View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois