W.E.B. Du Bois: “She saw the burning passion of the sun and with it the cold, unbending duty-deeds of upper air.”

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.

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.

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.