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" 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. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

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" To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. "

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 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

" The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

" The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races. "

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

" 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

" 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

" After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

" 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

" School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" The ruling of men is the effort to direct the individual actions of many persons toward some end. This end theoretically should be the greatest good of all, but no human group has ever reached this ideal because of ignorance and selfishness. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation. "

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

" Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" Negroes could be sold - actually sold as we sell cattle, with no reference to calves or bulls or recognition of family. It was a nasty business. The white South was properly ashamed of it and continually belittled and almost denied it. But it was a stark and bitter fact. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

" Before and after emancipation, the Negro, in self-defense, was propelled toward the white employer. The endowments of wealthy white men have developed great institutions of learning for the Negro, but the freedom of action on the part of these same universities has been curtailed in proportion as they are indebted to white philanthropies. "

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

" All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. "

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

" My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution. "

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