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

W. E. B. Du Bois

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W. E. B. Du Bois
Age: 95 †
Born: 1868
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: August 27
Autobiographer
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Photographer
Poet
Social Worker
Great Barrington
Massachusetts
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
WEB Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois
Minds
Weak
Fire
Untrained
Play
Wildly
Mind
Stimulate
Glitter
Fires
Mighty

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America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.
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Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born.
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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.
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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 in the possibility of infinite development.
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The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the cause for further discrimination.
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Men must not only know, they must act.
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When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, a vision, we ask not how does he look, but what is his message?. . . The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty. . . .
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Would America have been America without her Negro people?
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There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even peace.
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Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.
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Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.
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Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Today I see more clearly than yesterday that the back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellow men.
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The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.
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There may often be excuse for doing things poorly in this world, but there is never any excuse for calling a poorly done thing, well done.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away.
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Cannot the nation that has absorbed ten million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?
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And yet not a dream, but a mighty reality- a glimpse of the higher life, the broader possibilities of humanity, which is granted to the man who, amid the rush and roar of living, pauses four short years to learn what living means
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Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem?
W. E. B. Du Bois