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

More quotes by W. E. B. Du Bois

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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.
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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.
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If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they have not often let their presence be known.
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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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Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done.
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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.
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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Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
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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.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.
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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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.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The merchant must be no more pessimist than optimist, since pessimism induces him to hold back his capital but optimism induces him to take such risks that he has more to tear than to hope. Abu al'Fadl Ja'far al-Dimishqi (c. 9th century) Arab writer. The Beauties of Commerce Business pays ... philanthropy begs.
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Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem?
W. E. B. Du Bois
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In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Unless modern civilization is a failure, it is entirely feasible and practicable for two races in such essential political, economic and religious harmony as the white and colored people in America, to develop side by side in peace and mutual happiness, the peculiar contribution which each has to make to the culture of their common country.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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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