Quote of the Day (W.E.B. DuBois, on the Need To ‘Distinguish Between Fact and Desire’)

“If we are going, in the future,… to use human experience for the guidance of mankind, we have got clearly to distinguish between fact and desire.

“In the first place, somebody in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own wish and desire and belief. What we have got to know, so far as possible, are the things that actually happened in the world. Then with that much clear and open to every reader, the philosopher and prophet has a chance to interpret these facts; but the historian has no right, posing as scientist, to conceal or distort facts; and until we distinguish between these two functions of the chronicler of human action, we are going to render it easy for a muddled world out of sheer ignorance to make the same mistake ten times over.”— American sociologist, historian, editor, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935)