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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

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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
Lines
Islands
Race
Africa
America
Racism
Lighters
Problem
Relation
Lighter
Men
Sea
Darker
Line
Twentieth
Color
Races
Century
Asia

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A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.
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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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But art is not simply works of art it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
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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.
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[We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds.
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All art is propaganda...I do not care a damn, for any art that is not used for propaganda.
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The music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.
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Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground.
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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.
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To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.
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If the unemployed could eat plans and promises, they would be able to spend the winter on the Riviera.
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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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Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
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.
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There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong. Unfortunately, this can seldom be realized in real life for the very existence of the evil usually argues a moral weakness in the very place where extraordinary moral strength is called for.
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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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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.
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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.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The cause of war is preparation for war.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
W. E. B. Du Bois