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" 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

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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" A system of education is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter of schools. Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men. "

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

" Before and after emancipation, the Negro, in self-defense, was propelled toward the white employer. The endowments of wealthy white men have developed great institutions of learning for the Negro, but the freedom of action on the part of these same universities has been curtailed in proportion as they are indebted to white philanthropies. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" Education is the development of power and ideal. "

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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