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 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 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 Do not attempt to do a thing unless you are sure of yourself; but do not relinquish it simply becaus...
STEWART E. WHITE Security is the priceless product of freedom. Only the strong can be secure, and only in freedom can...
B. E. HUTCHINSON 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 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 Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Irela...
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 If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they ...
WILLIAM 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 I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions.
B. B. KING I have not been a good father, but no father has loved his children more. Like my father, I decided ...
B. B. KING I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on ...
B. B. KING I'm trying to get people to see that we are our brother's keeper. Red, white, black, brown o...
B. B. KING Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high sc...
B. B. KING Back when we was in school in Mississippi, we had Little Black Sambo. That's what you learned: A...
B. B. KING I don't care for the music when they're talking bad about women because I think women are Go...
B. B. KING The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit asha...
B. B. KING My mother was a very beautiful lady, I thought. She was very good to me. I guess - she died when I w...
B. B. KING Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I&...
B. B. KING I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, b...
B. B. KING Growing up, I was taught that a man has to defend his family. When the wolf is trying to get in, you...
B. B. KING Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.
B. B. KING I never wanted to be like other blues singers. I might like hearing them play, but I've never wa...
B. B. KING Even now, at 82 years old, if I don't learn something every day, you know what I think? It's...
B. B. KING I like jazz, rock n' roll, some hip hop - I can't think of any music I don't like.
B. B. KING The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.
B. B. KING Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but no one wants to die to get there!
B. B. KING If my fans want to do something for me when that time comes, I say, don't waste your money on me...
B. B. KING Water from the white fountain didn't taste any better than from the black fountain.
B. B. KING People all over the world have problems. And as long as people have problems, the blues can never di...
B. B. KING We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you're doing so.
B. B. KING I don't think anybody steals anything; all of us borrow.
B. B. KING Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. Wh...
B. B. KING If criticism has made such discoveries as to necessitate the abandonment of the doctrine of plenary ...
B. B. WARFIELD I bought my first electric guitar when I moved to Memphis; a Gibson with a DeArmond pickup which I u...
B. B. KING Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.
B. B. KING I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Er...
B. B. KING I almost chopped my thumb off once. Just before I left home, I was about ten or eleven years old, an...
B. B. KING I was born on a plantation, and things weren't so good. We didn't have any money. I never th...
B. B. KING The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.
B. B. KING When people treat you mean, you dislike them for that, but not because of their person, who they are...
B. B. KING I used to play - when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in ...
B. B. KING I was a singing disc jockey who heard every type of music there was - and loved it all.
B. B. KING 'She's Dynamite' was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thoug...
B. B. KING If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I'd never heard anything ...
B. B. KING I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie [Ray Vaughan] missed on bo...
B. B. KING When I do eventually drop, I pray to God that it'll happen in one of three ways. Firstly, on sta...
B. B. KING I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, g...
B. B. KING I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, g...
B. B. KING I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music...
B. B. KING My wife Martha used to call me Ol' Lemon Face because of my facial contortions when I play Lucil...
B. B. KING I tell my children now that they are older, 'If something happens to me... don't make no big...
B. B. KING I developed in my head that I'm never any better than my last concert or the last time I played,...
B. B. KING The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.
B. B. KING The way I feel today, as long as my health is good and I can handle myself well and people still com...
B. B. KING I got a chance to ride today on a very nice bus and from my window I can see how beautiful this coun...
B. B. KING My dad died, I think, at 87. So I'll be lucky if I make 87. But in a lot of cases, the younger p...
B. B. KING Touring a segregated America - forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most 'c...
B. B. KING Whenever I'm in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here...
B. B. KING I think of guitar players in terms of doctors: you have the doctor for your heart, the cardiologist,...
B. B. KING As for my band, well, my mentors were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and no one ha...
B. B. KING I don't have a favorite song that I've written. But I do have a favorite song: 'Always o...
B. B. KING We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you're doing so.
B. B. KING I think the clock is ticking, yes. In fact, I know it is. Frank Sinatra sang about the September of ...
B. B. KING When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. P...
B. B. KING Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon. I'...
B. B. KING When we went into World War II, I was a tractor driver then. I drove tractors on the plantation. So ...
B. B. KING In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caug...
B. B. KING It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asl...
B. B. KING