284 Quotes by W. E. B. Du Bois

I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.

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.

Education is the development of power and ideal.

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

The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.

Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.

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

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

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