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Would America have been America without her Negro people?

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
Headstrong
Negro
America
Without
Would
People

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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?
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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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I believe in pride of race and lineage and self: in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.
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The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.
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Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human.
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The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
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A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself
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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.
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Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.
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There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
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Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
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Ignorance is a cure for nothing.
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No people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro. The scheme is simple. You knock a man down and then have him arrested for assault. You kill a man and then hang the corpse.
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America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.
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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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It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disenfranchise the public and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.
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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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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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The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?
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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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