Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

Related Quotes:

" Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" The use of slave women as day workers naturally broke up or made impossible the normal Negro home, and this and the slave code led to a development of which the South was really ashamed and which it often denied, and yet perfectly evident: the raising of slaves in the Border slave states for systematic sale on the commercialized cotton plantations. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" As a race, the Negroes are not lazy. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, they are doomed for all time. It is not a case of ethics; it is a plain case of necessity. The method by which this may be done is, first, for the American Negro to achieve a new economic solidarity. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" There was not a single Negro slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learning and efficiency as the mass of poor white people around and about, and some quite as capable as the average slaveholder. They had continually, in the course of the history of slavery, recognized such men. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell. 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 the possibility of infinite development. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" From the very first, it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership? "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" I am a Bolshevik. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder. "

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 can be safely asserted that since early Colonial times, the North has had a distinct race problem. Every one of these States had slaves, and at the beginning of Washington's Administration, there were 40,000 black slaves and 17,000 black freemen in this section. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" I had a happy childhood and acceptance in the community. "

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

" Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself. "

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. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" Strange, is it not, my brothers, how often in America those great watchwords of human energy - 'Be strong!' 'Know thyself!' 'Hitch your wagon to a star!' - how often these die away into dim whispers when we face these seething millions of black men? And yet do they not belong to them? Are they not their heritage as well as yours? "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery? "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" Education and work are the levers to uplift a people. "

W. E. B. Du Bois