W.E.B. Du Bois

"The Talented Tenth must give back to their community."

"Patience is the greatest virtue, but inaction is the greatest sin."

"The beauty of the Negro soul lies in its resilience."

"We are not born hating; we are taught to hate."

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

"Gratitude is the memory of the heart."

"The Negro American stands at the crossroads of history."

"Wisdom comes not from years but from understanding."

"The greatest power is the power to imagine a better world."

"Love is the only force that can conquer hatred."

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas."

"The Negro is not a problem; the problem is whether the American people have the integrity to live up to their own Constitution."

"Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is the most fundamental."

"Education must not simply teach work—it must teach Life."

"The cost of living does not include the cost of life itself."

"One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings."

"To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a rich land is the very bottom of hardship."

"The true college will ever have one goal—not to earn meat, but to know the world."

"The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer."

"I believe it is the duty of the black man to accept complex relations of the world."

"The slave went free; stood a moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery."

"Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor—all men know something of poverty."

"If we are to achieve real equality, the richest and the poorest will have to shake hands."

"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; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment and detail between all elements of the nation."

"I will not disparage 'Blue-eyed Blondes.' I prefer intellectually to consort with Jews because I like the things by which Jews live and think."

"Where and how does a man assert himself to be a man? There is but one way—and that is through work."

"The riddle of existence is the college curriculum."

"This is the year of the rope, the faggot and the stake, when no black man's life is safe."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel a responsibility for the acts of other people."