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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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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
Humans
Chance
Average
Right
Rather
Intelligence
Always
Learn
Democratic
People
Experience
Beings
Given
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Government
Theory
Best
Courses
Human
Course
Bitter

More quotes by W. E. B. Du Bois

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There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.
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To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.
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Half the Christian churches of New York are trying to ruin the free public schools in order to replace them by religious dogma.
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 cause of war is preparation for war.
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I believe that there are human stocks with whom it is physically unwise to intermarry, but to think that these stocks are all colored or that there are no such white stocks is unscientific and false.
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.
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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.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.
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
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Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Would America have been America without her Negro people?
W. E. B. Du Bois
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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.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away.
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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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
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I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.
W. E. B. Du Bois
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Whiteness is ownership of the earth.
W. E. B. Du Bois