Quotes from W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself

Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.

For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.

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

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?

I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.

The most ordinary Negro is a distinct gentleman, but it takes extraordinary training and opportunity to make the average white man anything but a hog.

Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground.

I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls.

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

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.

Is it better because Europeans are better, nobler, greater, and more gifted than other folk? It is not. Europe has never produced and never will in our day bring forth a single human soul who cannot be matched and over-matched in every line of human endeavor by Asia and Africa. Run the gamut, if you will, and let us have the Europeans who in sober truth overmatch Nefertari, Mohammed, Rameses and Askia, Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus Christ.

The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.

Thus in the far-away Southern village the world lay waiting, half consciously, the coming of two young men, and dreamed in an inarticulate way of new things that would be done and new thoughts that all would think. And yet it was singular that few thought of two John's, -- for the black folk thought of one John, and he was black; and the white folk thought of another John, and he was white. And neither world thought the other world's thought, save with a vague unrest.

The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, 'What else are women for?

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.

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

Education must not simply teach work-it must teach life.

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done.

The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.