"Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life"
About this Quote
Du Bois turns optimism into a discipline, not a mood. "Believe in life!" lands like a command because he knew disbelief was a political condition as much as a personal one. In an America built to make Black life feel provisional, faith in the future isn’t inspirational wallpaper; it’s a strategy for survival and a refusal to concede the story to Jim Crow, lynching, disenfranchisement, and the softer violences of “you should be grateful” rhetoric. The exclamation point matters: he’s not offering comfort, he’s demanding stamina.
The line’s sleight of hand is in its scale. He begins with "life" in the singular - the basic right to exist with dignity - then widens to "human beings", staking a claim to universal humanity without surrendering the specificity of who has been denied it. That’s classic Du Bois: a moral argument that never forgets sociology. Progress here is not the empty boosterism of American self-mythology. It’s cumulative, earned, and social: "greater, broader, and fuller" reads like an expanding horizon, a life with room in it - for education, culture, political power, intimacy, and leisure. In other words, not just more years, but more world.
The subtext is also a rebuke to despair masquerading as realism. Du Bois watched movements fracture, reforms stall, wars erupt, and still insisted on the long arc not as destiny, but as a project. "Always" is audacious because history gave him every reason to hedge. He writes it anyway, as if to say: your oppressor’s best weapon is your exhaustion; don’t hand it to them.
The line’s sleight of hand is in its scale. He begins with "life" in the singular - the basic right to exist with dignity - then widens to "human beings", staking a claim to universal humanity without surrendering the specificity of who has been denied it. That’s classic Du Bois: a moral argument that never forgets sociology. Progress here is not the empty boosterism of American self-mythology. It’s cumulative, earned, and social: "greater, broader, and fuller" reads like an expanding horizon, a life with room in it - for education, culture, political power, intimacy, and leisure. In other words, not just more years, but more world.
The subtext is also a rebuke to despair masquerading as realism. Du Bois watched movements fracture, reforms stall, wars erupt, and still insisted on the long arc not as destiny, but as a project. "Always" is audacious because history gave him every reason to hedge. He writes it anyway, as if to say: your oppressor’s best weapon is your exhaustion; don’t hand it to them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Optimism |
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