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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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" 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

" 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

" 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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

" 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

" 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 am a Bolshevik. "

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

" 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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage. "

W. E. B. Du Bois