Essences De Bois Quotes

Half of this story is true and the other half might very well have happened. ~ William Pene Du Bois

Every creeper has a cause ~ Jazmin Bois

He isn't bashful, but an asshole who'd sooner smash his glass because it was half full. ~ Gordon P. Bois

If something seems completely doomed, just give it a little more time. Worst case scenario, you get to be right. Just find out for sure. ~ Jon Bois

Indeed neither life nor science bothers about "essences"-they leave "essences" to metaphysics, which is neither life nor science. ~ Alfred Korzybski

I believe that all men, black, brown, and white, are brothers. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Romance this moment, this hour, this day. String moments together like pearls on a rope. ~ Rachelle Du Bois

A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Ignorance is a cure for nothing. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

We have come to a generation which seeks advance without ideals - discovery without stars. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

That's the peculiar thing about nature," explained Mr. F., "it guards it's rarest treasures with greatest care. ~ William Pene Du Bois

The "Paz" was an armed slaver flying the American flag. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches men, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

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

Children learn more from what you are than what you teach. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

It seems strange to me that mechanical progress always seems to leave the slower demands of elegance far behind. ~ William Pene Du Bois

Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul. ~ 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

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

Men must not only know, they must act. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

All life long crying without avail, As the water all night long is crying to me. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana. ~ 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

I had a happy childhood and acceptance in the community. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

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

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

Every scientist is a descendant of Humboldt. We are all his family. ~ Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond

Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Denmark first responded to the denunciatory cries of the eighteenth century against slavery and the slave-trade. In 1792, by royal order, this traffic was prohibited in the Danish possessions after 1802. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The cause of war is preparation for war. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced in microcosm, all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice and social condition. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

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

Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States. ~ 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

Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

One ever feels his twoness,
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

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

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

Golden apples are beautiful–I remember the lawless days of boyhood, when orchards in crimson and gold tempted me over fence and field–and, too, the merchant who has dethroned the planter is no despicable parvenu. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us. ~ 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

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

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

obliteration of the Negro home. A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems. ~ 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

In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cotton-fields. This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom
the shadow of a marvelous dream. ~ 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

Comrade, you and I can never be satisfied with sitting down before a great human problem and saying nothing can be done. We must do something. That is the reason we are here on Earth. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

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. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior! ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough one-ness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Liberty trains for liberty. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil. ~ 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

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

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

I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong. ~ 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

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

Whiteness is ownership of the earth. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

VI. LOOKING BACKWARD

How the planters, having lost the war for slavery, sought to begin again where they left off in 1860, mere substituting for the individual ownership of slaves, a new state serfdom of black folk. ~ 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

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery, - this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law. Nor ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in the South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs,--needs it for the sake of own white sons and so daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental and moral development. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

[I] the is the duty of black men to judge the Southern discriminate lyrics. The present generation of Southerners are not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin
the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. ~ 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

People had a choice. They could continue wandering through the endless darkness, an absence of everything they loved, an endless void of disappointment and loneliness ...

... or they could look down, and embrace what they always had and loved. ~ Jon Bois

The true college will ever have but one goal - not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

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

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

There is no force equal to a woman determined to rise ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

..this noticeable in the South, where theology
and religious philosophy are on this account a long way behind the North, and where the religion of the poor whites is a plain copy of Negro thought and methods. ~ 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

The white economic and political elite often failed to recognize blacks as American, just as blacks often failed to recognize their potential for advancement outside of the limited opportunities afforded them by whites. ~ 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

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

If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois's famous words, "the problem of the color line," then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification. ~ Naomi Murakawa

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

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

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

A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers. ~ 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

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