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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.

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
Ground
Brethren
Forward
Lifting
Progress
Exceptional
Often
Affairs
Human
Slowly
Duller
Humans
Pull
Surging
Men
Push
Vantage
Affair
Painfully

More quotes by W. E. B. Du Bois

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Men must not only know, they must act.
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The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
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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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For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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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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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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One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, 'What else are women for?
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Whether you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down... Education must not simply teach work - it must teach life.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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All art is propaganda...I do not care a damn, for any art that is not used for propaganda.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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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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Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty for Beauty to set the world right.
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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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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But we do not merely protest we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell:the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls.
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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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 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 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.
W. E. B. Du Bois