W.E.B. DuBois

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W.E.B. DuBois (February 23, 1868–August 27, 1963) was a civil rights activist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar.

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There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong. Unfortunately, this can seldom be realized in real life; for the very existence of the evil usually argues a moral weakness in the very place where extraordinary moral strength is called for.
- The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1897), ch. XII: The Essentials in the Struggle, paragraph 93: "The Moral Movement" [1]

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
- The Study of the Negro Problems, paragraph 50 (The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. XI, January 1898) [2]

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, -- a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. 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. One ever feels his twoness,-- an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,-- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903) [3], Ch. I: Of Our Spiritual Strivings

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 Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. I: Of Our Spiritual Strivings

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. II: Of the Dawn of Freedom

And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature needs must make men narrow in order to give them force.
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. III: Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. V: Of the Wings of Atalanta

The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. V: Of the Wings of Atalanta

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. VI: Of the Training of Black Men

It is, then, the strife of all honorable men and women of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of the races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and imprudence and cruelty.
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. IX: Of the Sons of Master and Man

Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy and consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. IX: Of the Sons of Master and Man

The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the cause for further discrimination.
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. IX: Of the Sons of Master and Man

Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor,— all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked— who is good? not that men are ignorant,— what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. XII: Of Alexander Crummell

The price of freedom is less than the cost of repression.
- John Brown (1909): The Legacy of John Brown

I believe that there are human stocks with whom it is physically unwise to intermarry, but to think that these stocks are all colored or that there are no such white stocks is unscientific and false.
- Quoted in Fighting Fire with Fire: African Americans and Hereditarian Thinking, 1900-1942 by Gregory Michael Dorr [4]. Dorr dates this quote to 1910.

Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions of Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and unbridled power and wide oppression of men. Which is the true picture? The answer is simple: both are true. They are not opposite sides of the same shield; they are different shields.
- The Negro (1915), Ch. XI: The Negro in the United States [5]

The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.
- The Negro (1915), Ch. XI: The Negro in the United States

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.
- The Negro (1915), Ch. XI: The Negro in the United States

The cause of war is preparation for war.
- Darkwater (1920), Ch. II: The Souls of White Folk [6]

In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger.
- Radio broadcast, Beijing, 1959 [7]

The most ordinary Negro is a distinct gentleman, but it takes extraordinary training and opportunity to make the average white man anything but a hog.
- The Atlantic Monthly, interview with Ralph McGill (pub. November 1965)

The Soviet Union does not allow any church of any kind to interfere with education, and religion is not taught in public schools. It seems to me that this is the greatest gift of the Russian Revolution to the modern world. Most educated modern men no longer believe in religious dogma. If questioned they will usually resort to double-talk before admitting the fact. But who today actually believes that this world is ruled and directed by a benevolent person of great power who, on humble appeal, will change the course of events at our request? Who believes in miracles? Many folk follow religious ceremonies and services and allow their children to learn fairy tales and so-called religious truth, which in time the children come to recognize as conventional lies told by their parents and teachers for the children's good. One can hardly exaggerate the moral disaster of the custom. We have to thank the Soviet Union for the courage to stop it.
- The Autobiography of W.E. Burghardt Du Bois (International publishers, 1968), ch. IV: The Soviet Union
- Also in the Autobiography, ch. XVI: My Character: "I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools."

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