W. E. B. Du Bois quote: "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.'"

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you rea...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Education is the development of power and ideal.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?
W. E. B. DU BOIS

No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort to give all men what t...
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

I had a happy childhood and acceptance in the community.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which mo...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restrict...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Education and work are the levers to uplift a people.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of educatio...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my you...
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 ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Negroes could be sold - actually sold as we sell cattle, with no reference to calves or bulls or rec...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

I am a Bolshevik.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Ab...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line -- the relation of the darker ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critiq...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings...
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, ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Education must not simply teach work - it must teach Life.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broa...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Strange, is it not, my brothers, how often in America those great watchwords of human energy - '...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men....
W. E. B. DU BOIS

What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was th...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instea...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivin...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

An American, a Negro... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in o...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, they are do...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word '...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

It can be safely asserted that since early Colonial times, the North has had a distinct race problem...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of al...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to brea...
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...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

All men cannot go to college, but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast,...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's sel...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line: the relation of the darker to...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

There was not a single Negro slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learn...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

But what of black women?... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of the...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us m...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

From the very first, it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Th...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamel...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The Negro was freed and turned loose as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. Ninety-nine ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture amo...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!
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 th...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Before and after emancipation, the Negro, in self-defense, was propelled toward the white employer. ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self th...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

But what of black women? . . . I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought ...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best w...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that br...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justi...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It d...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a ninetee...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The use of slave women as day workers naturally broke up or made impossible the normal Negro home, a...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana.
W. E. B. DU BOIS

The ruling of men is the effort to direct the individual actions of many persons toward some end. Th...
W. E. B. DU BOIS

If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they ...
WILLIAM E. B. DU BOIS

Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
W.E.B. DU BOIS

My 'morals' were sound, even a bit puritanic, but when a hidebound old deacon inveighed against danc...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon 'Hell and Damnation'�...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.
W.E.B. DU BOIS

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
W.E.B. DU BOIS

What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpo...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
W.E.B. DU BOIS

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in the United States over half the...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of poverty; no...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled striv...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-cons...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for ...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

I sit with

[We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and ener...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

Eastward and westward storms are breaking,--great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. ...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the p...
W.E.B. DU BOIS

My own military background is wholly un-distinguished. I was a sergeant.
W. E. B. GRIFFIN

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.
W. E. B. GRIFFIN

Argentina has the best bird shooting in the world.
W. E. B. GRIFFIN

We are a race of artists. What are we doing about it?
SHIRLEY GRAHAM DU BOIS

Half of this story is true and the other half might very well have happened.
WILLIAM PèNE DU BOIS

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. -W. B. Yeats.
W. B. YEATS

In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience.
W. B. PRESCOTT

A DEEP-SWORN VOW Others because you did not keep That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine. Yet...
W B YEATS

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
E. B. WHITE

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
E. B. WHITE

The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustmen...
E. B. WHITE

Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have...
E. B. WHITE

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of t...
E. B. WHITE

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All...
E. B. WHITE

The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid...
E. B. WHITE

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
E. B. WHITE

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
E. B. WHITE

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.
E. B. WHITE

I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.
E. B. WHITE

There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to an...
E. B. WHITE

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
E. B. WHITE

The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and ...
E. B. WHITE

Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
E. B. WHITE

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
E. B. WHITE

We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting t...
E. B. WHITE

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
E. B. WHITE

Be obscure clearly.
E. B. WHITE

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove ...
E. B. WHITE

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mou...
E. B. WHITE

Security is the priceless product of freedom. Only the strong can be secure, and only in freedom can...
B. E. HUTCHINSON

There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.
E. B. WHITE

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. T...
E. B. WHITE

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometim...
E. B. WHITE

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can...
E. B. WHITE

Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discoura...
E. B. WHITE

It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is...
E. B. WHITE

Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
E. B. WHITE

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E. B. WHITE

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
E. B. WHITE

A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
E. B. WHITE

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
E. B. WHITE

I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the...
E. B. WHITE

Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and ...
E. B. WHITE

The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
E. B. WHITE

People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unj...
E. B. WHITE

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the ...
E. B. WHITE

The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change-and we all instinctively avoid...
E. B. WHITE

Weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society -- things can look dark, t...
E. B. WHITE

From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive
E. B. WHITE

All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can w...
E. B. WHITE

Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can...
E. B. WHITE

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond...
E. B. WHITE

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving he can outw...
E. B. WHITE

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens
E. B. WHITE

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than a whole one
E. B. WHITE

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of t...
E. B. WHITE

It should restate and clarify the social dilemma and the political pickle. Once in a while it does, ...
E. B. WHITE

Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of ...
E. B. WHITE

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind
E. B. WHITE

To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.
E. B. WHITE

Oh, I never look under the hood.
E. B. WHITE

It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is...
E. B. WHITE

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer l...
E. B. WHITE

Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sens...
E. B. WHITE

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.
E. B. WHITE

The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all...
E. B. WHITE

Fishing seems to be the favorite form of loafing.
E. W. HOWE

A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees th...
E. W. HOWE

Marriage is a good deal like a circus: there is not as much in it as is represented in the advertisi...
E. W. HOWE

If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums wo...
E. W. HOWE

Half the time men think they are talking business, they are wasting time.
E. W. HOWE

Living up to ideals is like doing everyday work with your Sunday clothes on.
E. W. HOWE

A woman is as old as she looks before breakfast.
E. W. HOWE

The most destructive criticism is indifference.
E. W. HOWE

Every successful person I have heard of has done the best he could with the conditions as he found t...
E. W. HOWE

The feeling of sleepiness when you are not in bed, and can't get there, is the meanest feeling i...
E. W. HOWE

Many people would be more truthful were it not for their uncontrollable desire to talk.
E. W. HOWE

Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which d...
E. W. HOWE

A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.
E. W. HOWE

Instead of loving your enemies - treat your friends a little better.
E. W. HOWE

One of the surprising things in this world is the respect a worthless man has for himself.
E. W. HOWE

The underdog often starts the fight, and occasionally the upper dog deserves to win.
E. W. HOWE

Many a man is saved from being a thief by finding everything locked up.
E. W. HOWE

When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will hav...
E. W. HOWE

The man who can keep a secret may be wise, but he is not half as wise as the man with no secrets to ...
E. W. HOWE

A young man is a theory, an old man is a fact.
E. W. HOWE

The greatest humiliation in life, is to work hard on something from which you expect great appreciat...
E. W. HOWE

The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out hap...
W. E. CHANNING

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a s...
E. W. DIJKSTRA

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
E. W. DIJKSTRA

It is hard to convince a high-school student that he will encounter a lot of problems more difficult...
E. W. HOWE

Never tell a secret to a bride or a groom; wait until they have been married longer.
E. W. HOWE

To be an ideal guest, stay at home.
E. W. HOWE

Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.
E. W. HOWE

When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up...
E. W. HOWE

A thief believes everybody steals.
E. W. HOWE

The only way to amuse some people is to slip and fall on an icy pavement.
E. W. HOWE

There are three great friends: an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.
E. W. HOWE

The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and ...
E. W. DIJKSTRA

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be reguarded as a criminal offen...
E. W. DIJKSTRA

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposur...
E. W. DIJKSTRA

There is always a type of man who says he loves his fellow men, and expects to make a living at it.
E. W. HOWE

The modest person is usually admired, if people ever hear of them.
E. W. HOWE

The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at ...
E. W. HOWE

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.'

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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

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