W. E. B. Du Bois Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von W. E. B. Du Bois:

I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

As a race, the Negroes are not lazy.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

But what of black women?... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

There was not a single Negro slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learning and efficiency as the mass of poor white people around and about, and some quite as capable as the average slaveholder. They had continually, in the course of the history of slavery, recognized such men.

W. E. B. Du Bois

Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.

W. E. B. Du Bois

One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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?

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

An American, a Negro... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

W. E. B. Du Bois