To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
Topics: The Poor, Poverty
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
Topics: Modesty, Humility
I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
Human nature is not simple and any classification that roughly divides men into good and bad, superior and inferior, slave and free, is and must be ludicrously untrue and universally dangerous as a permanent exhaustive classification.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
Topics: Life
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
Topics: Knowledge
I believe in liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
Topics: Freedom
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
—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
Topics: Books
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
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
Topics: Race, Racism
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
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
Topics: Usefullness
Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jesse Jackson American Baptist Civil Rights Activist
- Martin Luther King, Jr. American Civil Rights Leader
- Rosa Parks American Civil Rights Leader
- Whitney Young American Civil Rights Leader
- Susan B. Anthony American Civil Rights Leader
- Jane Addams American Social Reformer
- Carrie Chapman Catt American Suffragist
- Henry Adams American Historian
- Marian Wright Edelman American Civil Regrets Advocate
- Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot American Sociologist
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