110+ W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes On Education, Success And Equality

W. E. B. Du Bois was an American writer, sociologist, and civil rights activist. He is best known for being a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He is also remembered for his writings on race and for his pioneering sociological studies of African American communities. Following is our collection on famous quotes by W. E. B. Du Bois on education, success, equality.

Top 10 W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

1. There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.
2. We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong - this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.
3. Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.
4. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
5. Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.
6. There is no force equal to a woman determined to rise
7. I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.
8. Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done.
9. The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
10. Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.

W. E. B. Du Bois Image Quotes

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression. — W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois Short Quotes

• The cause of war is preparation for war.
• No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.
• The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?
• Whiteness is ownership of the earth.
• To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.
• A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself
• To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
• I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.
• There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
• All art is propaganda...I do not care a damn, for any art that is not used for propaganda.

W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes About Education

Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men. — W. E. B. Du Bois

[We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds. — W. E. B. Du Bois

I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The severest charge that can be brought against the Christian education of the Negro in the South during the last thirty years is the reckless way in which sap-headed young fellows, without ability, and, in some cases, without character, have been urged and pushed into the ministry. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Education must not simply teach work - it must teach Life. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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

A system of education is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter of schools. Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Education is the development of power and ideal. — W. E. B. Du Bois

For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. — W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes About Ignorance

Herein lies the tragedy of the age: Not that men are poor, - all men know something of poverty. Not that men are wicked, - who is good? Not that men are ignorant, - what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Ignorance is a cure for nothing. — 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

Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes About Race

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born. — W. E. B. Du Bois

I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even peace. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

As a race, the Negroes are not lazy. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. — W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes About Negro

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Would America have been America without her Negro people? — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Cannot the nation that has absorbed ten million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve? — W. E. B. Du Bois

If you want to feel humor too exquisite and subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — 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

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

W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes About Black

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white. — W. E. B. Du Bois

We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime. — W. E. B. Du Bois

I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too. — W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes About Negroes

Negroes could be sold - actually sold as we sell cattle, with no reference to calves or bulls or recognition of family. It was a nasty business. The white South was properly ashamed of it and continually belittled and almost denied it. But it was a stark and bitter fact. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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

The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the cause for further discrimination. — 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

Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage. — W. E. B. Du Bois

As Negro voting increased, Congress got an improved sense of hearing. — W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes About World

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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? — 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

There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx's Capital. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly "forgot it" and named their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Life has its pains and evils-its bitter disappointments; but like a good novel and in healthful length of days, there is infinite joy in seeing the World, the most interesting of continued stories, unfold. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois Famous Quotes And Sayings

In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stands up and protests. The protest need not be merely physical-the throwing of stones and bullets-if it is mental, spiritual; if it expresses itself in silent, persistent dissatisfaction, the cost to the oppressor is terrific. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Today I see more clearly than yesterday that the back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellow men. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of the white oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid; and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease! — 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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa? — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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 society — W. E. B. Du Bois

Harriet Tubman fought American slavery single handed and was a pioneer in that organized effort known as the Underground Railroad. — 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

So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers. — W. E. B. Du Bois

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Unless modern civilization is a failure, it is entirely feasible and practicable for two races in such essential political, economic and religious harmony as the white and colored people in America, to develop side by side in peace and mutual happiness, the peculiar contribution which each has to make to the culture of their common country. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Half the Christian churches of New York are trying to ruin the free public schools in order to replace them by religious dogma. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American. — 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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations, that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leadership, such social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves. — W. E. B. Du Bois

In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and faith. All words and all thinking lead to the child, - to that vast immortality and wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child represents. — W. E. B. Du Bois

...in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. — W. E. B. Du Bois

At best, the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer. — W. E. B. Du Bois

If the unemployed could eat plans and promises, they would be able to spend the winter on the Riviera. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Strange, is it not, my brothers, how often in America those great watchwords of human energy - 'Be strong!' 'Know thyself!' 'Hitch your wagon to a star!' - how often these die away into dim whispers when we face these seething millions of black men? And yet do they not belong to them? Are they not their heritage as well as yours? — 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

But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too. — 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

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

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? — W. E. B. Du Bois

For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals. — W. E. B. Du Bois

It is, then, the strife of all honorable men and women of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of the races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and imprudence and cruelty. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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. — W. E. B. Du Bois

But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell:the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears; the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls. — W. E. B. Du Bois

We cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world is reason, if this ever becomes a reasonable world. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. — W. E. B. Du Bois

The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon Hell and Damnation-upon an attempt to scare people into being decent and threatening them with the terrors of death and punishment. We are still trained to believe a good deal that is simply childish in theology. The outward and visible punishment of every wrong deed that men do the repeated declaration that anything can be gotten by anyone at any time by prayer. — W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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

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

I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above. — W. E. B. Du Bois

Life Lessons by W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois was an American writer and civil rights activist who fought for racial justice and equality. He taught us to stand up for what we believe in and to never give up in the face of adversity. He also showed us the importance of education and knowledge in order to create a better future for ourselves and our communities.