W. E. B. Du Bois

All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.

The dark world is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others. . . . One feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.

Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor - all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked - who is good? Not that men are ignorant - what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world's need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this - with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need - this life is hell.

Would America have been America without her Negro people?

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.

The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.

I believe in pride of race and lineage and self - in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.