284 Quotes by W. E. B. Du Bois

One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.

I believe that all men, black, brown, and white, are brothers.

For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.

All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold.

Would America have been America without her Negro people?

The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; if is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment from which forms the secret of civilization.

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.

The world is shrinking together; it is finding itself neighbor to itself in strange, almost magic degree.

As Negro voting increased, Congress got an improved sense of hearing.