Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?
W. E. B. Du BoisEducation is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
W. E. B. Du BoisBut art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
W. E. B. Du BoisThe time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.
W. E. B. Du BoisThe kind of sermon which is preached in most colored churches is not today attractive to even fairly intelligent men.
W. E. B. Du Bois