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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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" My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. "

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

" 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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

" 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

" The Negro was freed and turned loose as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. Ninety-nine per cent were field hands and servants of the lowest class. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" Education is the development of power and ideal. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute - this is the only way of human life. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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 must not simply teach work - it must teach Life. "

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

" 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

" St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

" What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior! "

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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

Twentieth Century

" 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

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

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

" 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

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

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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois