W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes on Knowledge
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), the American sociologist, historian, and political philosopher whose The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the long Black Reconstruction in America (1935) supplied early-twentieth-century thought with two of its most influential works on the epistemology and social structure of racial domination, gave Anglophone philosophy the founding doctrine of double consciousness — the structural cognitive condition of those whose self-understanding is forced to incorporate the self-image imposed on them by a dominant racial majority. The framework treats this double perspective as both the wound and the gift of African-American intellectual life, supplying a synoptic standpoint from which the dominant social order can be analyzed in ways its beneficiaries cannot achieve from within their own self-image alone.
Quotes
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Attributed to W. E. B. Du Bois:
“Education must not simply teach work; it must teach life.”
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“W. E. B. Du Bois, quoted in John M. Hobson. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation. New York: Bridge University Press, 2004.”
It has long been the belief of modern men that the history of Europe covers the essential history of civilization, with unimportant exceptions; that the progress of the white [Europeans] has been along the one natural, normal path to the highest possible human culture. -
“There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.”
The Study of the Negro Problems, paragraph 51, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , vol. XI (January 1898) -
“The Talented Tenth , published as the second chapter of The Negro Problem, a collection of articles by African Americans (New York: James Pott and Company, 1903)”
I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men. -
“Niagara Movement Speech" (1905)”
The school system in the country districts of the South is a disgrace and in few towns and cities are Negro schools what they ought to be. We want the national government to step in and wipe out illiteracy in the South. Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States. And when we call for education we mean real education. We believe in work . We ourselve