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" 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
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Numbers
Reading
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" 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
Daily
War
Place
" 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
Youth
Planning
Teacher
" 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
Men
Good
Effort
" 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
Time
American
Achieve
" A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Classic
Again
Book
" How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Human
How
Hard
" 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
World
Personal
Matter
" In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Leadership
Abraham
Courage
" A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Rights
Credit
More
" 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
" 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. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Gift
Men
Soul
" 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
People
Leadership
Work
" To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Mighty
Play
Weak
" I was born free. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Born
Free
I Was Born
" As a race, the Negroes are not lazy. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Race
Lazy
Negroes
" 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
Race
Beginning
Black
" 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
Men
Long
Battle
" 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
Black
Teachers
People
" Education is the development of power and ideal. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Power
Development
Ideal
" 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
Before
Slave
Constitution
" Education must not simply teach work - it must teach Life. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Must
Teach
Work
" For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Picture
Labor
Land
" But what of black women?... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Through
Race
Fire
" 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
Possibilities
Human
World
" Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. "
W. E. B. Du Bois
Reform
Itself
Capitalism
" 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
Freedom
Action
Men
" 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
Day
Equality
Black
" 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
America
Man
Problem
" 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
Death
Men
Problem
" 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
Work
Education
Knowledge