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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

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" Education is the development of power and ideal. "

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

" 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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

" If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they have not often let their presence be known. "

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

" I am a Bolshevik. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" I was born free. "

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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois