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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

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

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

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

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

" If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, they are doomed for all time. It is not a case of ethics; it is a plain case of necessity. The method by which this may be done is, first, for the American Negro to achieve a new economic solidarity. "

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

" St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

" I am a Bolshevik. "

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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

" 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

" 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