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So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers.

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
Often
Aging
Sordid
Life
Selfish
Sneer
Watches
Shrink
Watch
Shrinks
Learning
Lofty
Full
Distrust
High
Resolve
Sneers
Purpose
Enter
Shrewd

More quotes by W. E. B. Du Bois

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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.
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Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future world will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it.
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.
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At best, the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger.
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Harriet Tubman fought American slavery single handed and was a pioneer in that organized effort known as the Underground Railroad.
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If you want to feel humor too exquisite and subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers.
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To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.
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The severest charge that can be brought against the Christian education of the Negro in the South during the last thirty years is the reckless way in which sap-headed young fellows, without ability, and, in some cases, without character, have been urged and pushed into the ministry.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong - this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world's need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this - with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need - this life is hell.
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Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.
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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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.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The most ordinary Negro is a distinct gentleman, but it takes extraordinary training and opportunity to make the average white man anything but a hog.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The favorite device of the devil, ancient and modern, is to force a human being into a more or less artificial class, accuse the class of unnamed and unnameable sin, and then damn any individual in the alleged class, however innocent he may be.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.
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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Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.
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