Life & Wisdom Quote by W. E. B. Du Bois

Du Bois flips a familiar patriotic cliché into a ledger of power. “Cost” is what you invest upfront; “price” is what you get charged after someone else sets the terms. That distinction matters. Liberty, in his framing, isn’t free, but it’s at least a bill you choose to pay: organizing, risking status, funding institutions, enduring backlash. Repression looks “cheap” in the moment because it externalizes the expense onto the silenced. Du Bois’s line drags those hidden charges into the open.

The subtext is a rebuke to cautious moderates and comfortable liberals who treat freedom as an aspirational luxury and order as a practical necessity. Du Bois is saying: you are already paying. You’re just paying in someone else’s currency - stolen wages, curtailed education, police violence, political disenfranchisement, the psychic corrosion of living under a lie. Repression accumulates interest: it requires surveillance, propaganda, prisons, and a permanently anxious state trying to hold down the people it refuses to include. Liberty, by contrast, is a stabilizing expense because it reduces the need for coercion.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing across Reconstruction’s betrayal, Jim Crow’s architecture, and the early Cold War’s policing of dissent, Du Bois understood how “security” rhetoric launders injustice. His point isn’t abstract moralism; it’s political economics. A society can finance rights now, or it can finance control forever. The irony is that repression always claims to be the bargain, right up until the invoice comes due.