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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

" Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

" I was born free. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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" Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage ground. "

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" 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

" In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

Twentieth Century

" Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort? "

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

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

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

" How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

" All men cannot go to college, but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have, for the talented few, centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living as to have no aims higher than their bellies and no God greater than Gold. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength. "

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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

" An American, a Negro... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. "

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

" 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

" Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.' "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too. "

W. E. B. Du Bois