William P C3 A8ne Du Bois Quotes

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

Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

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

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, - this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

From the very first, it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership? ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Our moral and practical attitude ... impulses, inhibitions ... how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent with the cavity of a jar ... It becomes our subconscious. [p. 287] ~ William James

I'm not an actual author but an accidental one. ~ William P. Young

The intricacy and the inherent beautiful fragility of the human soul is such that it is uniquely damaged and only God knows how to heal it, and it's going to take time. ~ William P. Young

To say that God is infinite," wrote A. W. Tozer, "is to say that He is measureless."3 ~ William P. Farley

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

Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! ~ 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

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

But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this rôle. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred, - making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike, - rather a great religion, a world war-cry: Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and parti-colored mongrel beasts! Instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood America has taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yellow peoples are concerned. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurshi p comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan. ~ William Deresiewicz

Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

I make a distinction between true and real. I think that the story is true, it's just not real. That's what a parable is. It takes things that we all know are real, and it takes life events that actually happen, and it weaves them into a fiction that allows truth to actually be embedded. ~ William P. Young

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

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

I was raised in a tribal situation, among cannibal people. ~ William P. Young

I think the issue of clergy sexual abuse sparked people to look at their faith in a different way. ~ William P. Leahy

The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South was primarily because of economic motives and the inter-connected political urge necessary to support slave industry; but to the watching world it sounded like the carefully thought out result of experience and reason; and because of this it was singularly disastrous for modern civilization science and religion, in art and government, as well as in industry. The South could say that the Negro, even when brought into modern civilization, could not be civilized, and that, therefore, he and the other colored peoples of the world were so far inferior to the whites that the white world had a right to rule mankind for their own selfish interests. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

I am very confident that the Spirit is with us. ~ William P. Leahy

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

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

Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility. ~ 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

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

There is no force equal to a woman determined to rise ~ 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

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

This the American Black man knows: his fight is a fight to the finish. Either he dies or he wins. He will enter modern civilization in America as a Black man on terms of perfect and unlimited equality with any white man, or he will enter not at all. Either extermination root and branch or absolute equality. There can be no compromise. This is the last great battle of the west. ~ 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

I give you an ability to respond and your response is to be free to love and serve in every situation, and therefore each moment is different and unique and wonderful. ~ William P. Young

It is the stars, it is the ancient stars, it is the young and everlasting stars! ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The TRUTH shall always be your unbeatable weapon.
~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from P. B. Y. M. Book 1 of Karmic Harvest Trilogy ~ Angelica Hopes

Instead of being impure men, they are very pure mannequins. ...One certainly paid a penalty for pleasures. But when that had passed... memories flowed. Like any experience for which one has had to pay and paid, in its full glory. It is impossible to say as much for the unpunishing purities of the escapist. ~ Guy Pene Du Bois