W.E.B. Du Bois: “On the other hand, Ugliness to me is eternal, not in the essence but in its incompleteness; but its eternity does not…”

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.

He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.