W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

None but ourselves can free our minds.

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds!

The existence of laws in the States where the newly emancipated negroes reside, which discriminated with gross injustice and hardship against them as a class, was the evil to be remedied …. The one pervading purpose, was protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.

The work does not end with the abolition of slavery but only begins.

All who abhor the immortality of discrimination and social injustice toward their fellow men must share the impatience of the nation’s Negro Americans and stand shoulder to shoulder with them in full active and affirmative support of their struggle to make a present reality out of the 100 year old Emancipation Proclamation.

'Liberation' is an interesting word because you can be liberated from external things and also from your internal dialogue.

The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states.

We must always bear in mind that we are not going to be free, but are free already. Every idea that we are bound is a delusion.

As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery.

Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.

Bondage is of the mind; freedom too is of the mind. If you say 'I am a free soul. I am a son of God who can bind me' free you shall be.

I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.

Liberation is not deliverance.

When I look at my life, I see that I wanted to be free of the physical plane, the psychological plane, and when I got free of those I didn't want to go anywhere near them.

We must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free.

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

Despite the great vision, it is only drop by drop that we squeeze the slave out of ourselves.

I don't believe in segregation. I believe in slavery.

The Master will allow him no home, that he may become a vagrant. Becoming a vagrant, he will arrest him as a vagabond, and visit him with imprisonment and stripes ... He will shut him off from the courts, seal his mouth as a witness.

Where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the Northern States it was merely superficial and easily corrected. In the Southern, it is incorporated with the whole system and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process. That it may finally be effected and its progress hastened, will be my last and fondest prayer.

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State [instead of colonizing them]? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

If you love your children, if you love your country, if you love the God of love, clear your lands from slaves, burden not your children or country with them.

Freedom is internal. Another group cannot give you freedom.

… true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the courts. It begins in woman's soul. History tells us that every oppressed class gained true liberation from its masters through its own efforts.