W. E. B. Du Bois

“I am a Bolshevik.”

“Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.”

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

“Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises an...”

“Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - thi...”

“Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom t...”

“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.”

“The Negro was freed and turned loose as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. Ninety-nine per cent were field hands and servants of the lowest class.”

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

“Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing...”

“A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.”

“If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?”

“No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute - this is the only way of human l...”

“Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.”

“Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.”

“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”

“What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!”

“The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.”

“The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.”

“All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda f...”