W. E. B. Du Bois
There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong. Unfortunately, this can seldom be realized in real life; for the very existence of the evil usually argues a moral weakness in the very place where extraordinary moral strength is called for.Collection: Crush
No people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro. The scheme is simple. You knock a man down and then have him arrested for assault. You kill a man and then hang the corpse.Collection: Men
The merchant must be no more pessimist than optimist, since pessimism induces him to hold back his capital but optimism induces him to take such risks that he has more to tear than to hope. Abu al'Fadl Ja'far al-Dimishqi (c. 9th century) Arab writer. The Beauties of Commerce Business pays ... philanthropy begs.Collection: Business
The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.Collection: Punishment
There may often be excuse for doing things poorly in this world, but there is never any excuse for calling a poorly done thing, well done.Collection: Often Is
This the American black man knows: his fight here is a fight to the finish. Either he dies or wins. If he wins it will be by no subterfuge or evasion of amalgamation . He will enter modern civilization here in America as a black man on terms of perfect and unlimited equality with any white man, or he will enter not at all. Either extermination root and branch, or absolute equality. There can be no compromise. This is the last great battle of the west.Collection: Fighting
One ever 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.Collection: Dark
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.Collection: Courage
The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.Collection: Work
A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himselfCollection: Marriage
No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.Collection: Selfishness
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.Collection: Government
The favorite device of the devil, ancient and modern, is to force a human being into a more or less artificial class, accuse the class of unnamed and unnameable sin, and then damn any individual in the alleged class, however innocent he may be.Collection: Class
Lord of the springtime, Father of flower, field and fruit, smile on us in these earnest days when the work is heavy and the toil wearisome; lift up our hearts, O God, to the things worthwhile-sunshine and night, the dripping rain, the song of the birds, books and music, and the voices of our friends. Lift up our hearts to these this night and grant us Thy peace. Amen.Collection: Song
Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us.Collection: Beauty
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem?Collection: Children
There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even peace.Collection: Race
Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future world will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it.Collection: Mean
I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.Collection: Fire
Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?Collection: Art
The cause of war is preparation for war.Collection: War
We cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world is reason, if this ever becomes a reasonable world.Collection: Winning
The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.Collection: Work
Would America have been America without her Negro people?Collection: America
Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, - this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern societyCollection: Government
It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disenfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.Collection: Power
We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of the white oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.Collection: White
Whether you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down... Education must not simply teach work - it must teach life.Collection: Teacher
As Negro voting increased, Congress got an improved sense of hearing.Collection: Voting
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.Collection: Brother
Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sang; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead: for four hundred years the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Life
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.Collection: Men
Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.Collection: Responsibility
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.Collection: Thinking
It is the stars, it is the ancient stars, it is the young and everlasting stars!Collection: Stars
I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.Collection: War
For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.Collection: Men
The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.Collection: Magic
The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; if is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment from which forms the secret of civilization.Collection: Graduation
Whiteness is ownership of the earth.Collection: Earth
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.Collection: Disappointment
Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.Collection: White
All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.Collection: Mother
It is the wind and the rain, O God, the cold and the storm that make this earth of yours to blossom and bear its fruit. So in our lives it is storm and stress and hurt and suffering that make real men and women bring the world’s work to its highest perfection.Collection: Real
A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.Collection: Book