284 Quotes by W. E. B. Du Bois

The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence, – else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek, – the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire.

Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and kindergartens, industrial and technical schools, literature and tolerance, – all these spring from knowledge and culture, the children of the university. So must men and nations build, not otherwise, not upside down.

In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.

We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.

South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future.

How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure, – is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?

So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of their right to demand it. This is the tangle of thought and afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men for life. Behind.

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.

Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living – Liberty, Justice, and Right – is marked “For White People Only.