Carlier Bois Quotes

#1. Astrid," Linda called, her feet tucked under herself on the flower-print couch. "If you had a choice between two weeks in Paris France, all expenses paid, or a car - "
"Shitty Buick," Debby interjected.
"What's wrong with a Buick?" Marvel said.
" - which would you take?" Linda picked something out of the corner of her eye with a long press-on nail.
I brought their drinks, suppressing the desire to limp theatrically, the deformed servant, and fit all the glasses into hands without spilling. They couldn't be serious. Paris? My Paris? Elegant fruit shops and filterless Gitanes, dark woolen coats, the Bois de Boulogne? "Take the car," I said. "Definitely. #Quote by Janet Fitch

#2. The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people, - a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#3. The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#4. Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#5. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#6. The hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#7. Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem? To have your very body and the bodies of your children to be assume to be criminal, violent, malignant. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#8. But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#9. Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others - usually the sons of the masters - wish to help him to rise. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#10. They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#11. the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself, - darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#12. My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#13. Scott calls Bois-Guilbert "an unprincipled voluptuary," which is hard to improve on. #Quote by Richard Armour

#14. 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 and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#15. We chased her across the Pont-Neuf and through the Bois de Boulogne, kicking up leaves, and one day we knew that no matter where we might find ourselves in the world, Paris would be an ache in our hearts. Yes, we were young students in Paris. We had gone there because we knew it was the city of love and learning and light. Where it would lead was not as important as where we were at the moment. Looking at the city, we thought we saw our whole lives. Perhaps we did. #Quote by Karen Schur

#16. Strange, is it not, my brothers, how often in America those great watchwords of human energy - 'Be strong!' 'Know thyself!' 'Hitch your wagon to a star!' - how often these die away into dim whispers when we face these seething millions of black men? And yet do they not belong to them? Are they not their heritage as well as yours? #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#17. In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#18. It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#19. A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#20. But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell:the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears; the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#21. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#22. We have come to a generation which seeks advance without ideals - discovery without stars. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#23. Lord of the springtime, Father of flower, field and fruit, smile on us in these earnest days when the work is heavy and the toil wearisome; lift up our hearts, O God, to the things worthwhile-sunshine and night, the dripping rain, the song of the birds, books and music, and the voices of our friends. Lift up our hearts to these this night and grant us Thy peace. Amen. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#24. A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#25. The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#26. I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#27. All men cannot go to college, but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have, for the talented few, centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living as to have no aims higher than their bellies and no God greater than Gold. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#28. Men must not only know, they must act. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#29. But what of black women? ... I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#30. 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 wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.' #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#31. In any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#32. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#33. Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches men, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#34. The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion. #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#35. But, back of this, still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking in the great night a new religious ideal. Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of 10,000,000 souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living - Liberty, Justice and Right - is marked "For White People Only". #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois