Web Dubois Quotes – Insightful Words on Race, Equality, and Social Justice

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

Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.

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

One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.

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.

Children learn more from what you are, than what you teach.

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow.

Either America will destroy ignorance, or ignorance will destroy the United States.

There is no force equal to a woman determined to rise.

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You’re my human Africa.”

The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.

These things cannot be explained, — Perhaps not to any man.

Web Dubois Quotes – Insightful Words on Race, Equality, and Social Justice part 2

Behind the veil, forbidden pleasure bore love’s joys, half-cherished, dim.

The power to inculcate its ideals and prejudices was then given to the press, the pulpit, the school, and the stage.

They are virtually at strife. The fxceptional men in each race despise and suspect the exceptional men in other races.

They do not weave the web of social life, nor make the laws, nor build the cities, nor carry the canons.

For double duties, share, taxation fair Must follow property; the poor guest Must bear his burden too of the Crystal stair.

That which is true and that which is beautiful unite with that which is holy and just.

Through all his wonderful creation, from the infinitesimal atom to the immeasurable dome of the sky, runs that archaic truth—bigotry is one of the chief civilizations of mankind.

Men must not be judged by their clothes, by the colour of their skin, by the shape of their ears, or by the fancifulness of their theories, but by the worth and truth of their thought.

Violence and hatred and bitterness are ugly things.

Some day the 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 — shall be the happy portion of all our men.

Do not underestimate the power of knowledge.

A little knowledge is dangerous.

The true college will ever have one goal, not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.

A system of education is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter of schools.

Now is the autumn of the great and deathless cause of Woman’s Freedom,–for the emancipation of woman, morgue and nursery must turn to the university and the creche.

Idealism is one of the victories of life, especially of the negro people.

Now is the accepted time for the growth of innovation, for the spirit of universal culture and the reconciliation of classes, and races, and nations.

We will not pay bodily tribute to any nation on earth.

The soul that is forever guilty is forever busy.

We are the poorest of boys and girls, traveling, with broken knowledge and superstition as our guides.

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

The true college will ever have one goal, not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.

But … death cannot kill the truth.

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom of any sort that does not involve the suppression of someone else.

They do not succeed because they are white, but because they are members of an exclusive caste and because they fall into the line of pub