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" 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

Ignorance

Men

Group

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

" North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights. "

" 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? "

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

" It can be safely asserted that since early Colonial times, the North has had a distinct race problem. Every one of these States had slaves, and at the beginning of Washington's Administration, there were 40,000 black slaves and 17,000 black freemen in this section. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment. "

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

" The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery? "

" 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. "

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

" Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "