W. E. B. Du Bois

The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?

I had a happy childhood and acceptance in the community.

My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution.

I was born free.

The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.

Education and work are the levers to uplift a people.

I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too.

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?

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.

My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

The use of slave women as day workers naturally broke up or made impossible the normal Negro home, and this and the slave code led to a development of which the South was really ashamed and which it often denied, and yet perfectly evident: the raising of slaves in the Border slave states for systematic sale on the commercialized cotton plantations.

North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.

Strange, is it not, my brothers, how often in America those great watchwords of human energy - 'Be strong!' 'Know thyself!' 'Hitch your wagon to a star!' - how often these die away into dim whispers when we face these seething millions of black men? And yet do they not belong to them? Are they not their heritage as well as yours?

For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals.

I am a Bolshevik.

Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.

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.

From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation.

Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.

Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.

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.

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.'

As a race, the Negroes are not lazy.

How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real!

Negroes could be sold - actually sold as we sell cattle, with no reference to calves or bulls or recognition of family. It was a nasty business. The white South was properly ashamed of it and continually belittled and almost denied it. But it was a stark and bitter fact.

The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.

For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.

No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute - this is the only way of human life.

Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage.

If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat, they are doomed for all time. It is not a case of ethics; it is a plain case of necessity. The method by which this may be done is, first, for the American Negro to achieve a new economic solidarity.

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

If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?

Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage ground.

St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud.

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

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.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Education is the development of power and ideal.

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.

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.

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

For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote.

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!

A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.

School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.