Quotes from W. E. B. Du Bois

The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.

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!

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

Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be.

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.

I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.

Education and work are the levers to uplift a people.

The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.

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

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.

The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer.

The cause of war is preparation for war.

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.

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world's need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this—with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need—this life is hell.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others…. One feels his twoness—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.

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.

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.

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

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

Education is the development of power and ideal.

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