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Herein lies the tragedy of the age: Not that men are poor, - all men know something of poverty. Not that men are wicked, - who is good? Not that men are ignorant, - what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.

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
Men
Poor
Ignorant
Culture
Diversity
Black
Tragedy
Truth
Lies
Littles
Poverty
Little
Age
Something
Knowledge
Herein
Good
Lying
Wicked

More quotes by W. E. B. Du Bois

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We cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world is reason, if this ever becomes a reasonable world.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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If you want to feel humor too exquisite and subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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...in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The true college will ever have but one goal - not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society if is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment from which forms the secret of civilization.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations, that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leadership, such social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Would America have been America without her Negro people?
W. E. B. Du Bois
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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
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The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
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.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Ignorance is a cure for nothing.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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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.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Men must not only know, they must act.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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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.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and faith. All words and all thinking lead to the child, - to that vast immortality and wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child represents.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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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