Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by W. E. B. Du Bois (American Sociologist, Activist)

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963,) in full William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was an American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and civil-rights activist. He was the most significant U.S. black protest leader in the first half of the 20th century.

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he studied at Fisk University, Tennessee, and at Harvard. He was the first black person to be awarded a PhD (1895.) He was later a professor of economics and history at Atlanta University 1897–1910.

Du Bois rose to distinction as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists that campaigned for equal rights for blacks. He was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP; 1908.) He edited its magazine, Crisis (1910–34,) but later disassociated himself from the association, finding it too conservative. He also helped organize the First Pan-Africanist Congress (1919.)

Du Bois’s collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a landmark of African American literature. He wrote several crucial works on slavery and the ‘color problem,’ including The Negro (1915,) Black Reconstruction (1935,) and Color and Democracy (1945.) He also wrote novels, such as The Dark Princess (1928) and Worlds of Color (1961.) A passionate advocate of radical black action and an early supporter of the suffragist movement-which he tried to link with the struggle for black rights—he joined the Communist Party in 1961. Du Bois wrote various novels, including the trilogy The Black Flame (1957–61.)

Du Bois was awarded the Lenin International Peace Prize in 1958. He moved to Ghana in 1959, renounced his U.S. citizenship, joined the Communist party in 1961, and became a naturalized Ghanaian just before he died. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois was published in 1968.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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