Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

Related Quotes:

" One ever feels his twoness - 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

" 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

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

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 is the development of power and ideal. "

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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 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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

Twentieth Century

" 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 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

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

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

" 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 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

" 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

" Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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