W.E.B. Du Bois

"Faith is born of despair and dies of proof."

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."

"All art is propaganda for change."

"I know no greater good than to awaken the conscience of the world."

"The world is rising up, and I rise with it."

"One ever feels his two-ness in this American world."

"The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil."

"Great things come to those who work and wait."

"Let us be honest; we have a powerful weapon in blackness itself."

"The souls of black folk contain the very essence of the American spirit."

"My life has had a single controlling purpose—the freedom of black people."

"I am by birth free and by temperament a radical."

"One cannot live without eating, but one lives to eat."

"The capacity for knowledge does not prove its possession."

"Forever human, I remain part of this great world."

"Death is not failure, but the consummation of life."

"We must train and make leaders in all walks of American life."

"The assumption that a people taken at random from all ranks and conditions of three continents of Africa would readily yield to the control of Europeans, is certainly optimistic."

"Courage, my friends; 'tis not too late to build a better world."

"The problem is that people are the same everywhere."

"Ignorance is a cure that may be achieved in a day, but the results of that ignorance cannot be cured in generations."

"Strike the iron while it is hot; mold the plastic mass with patience."

"The American Negro has gotten social security but lost his soul."

"Nations reel and fall because of the buildup of private wrongs into public evils."

"Money as such is useless; it is the demand of some to use it which makes it valuable."

"Health is the first requisite of happiness."

"The great majority of the Negro people of the United States still live in the South, and are farmers."

"Those who believe their own lies eventually get caught in them."

"I've always been an agitator for change."

"The educated Negro is the most unhappy in America."