Top 100 Frederick Douglass Quotes
#1. Shields Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man of few words, and his speech was singularly broken; but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character.
Frederick Douglass
#2. They suppress the truth rather than take the consequence of telling it, and in so doing prove themselves a part of the human family.
Frederick Douglass
#3. The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think, and to SPEAK.
Frederick Douglass
#4. It is the mission of the printer to diffuse light and knowledge by a judicious intermingling of black with white.
Frederick Douglass
#5. Be not discouraged. There is a future for you ... The resistance encountered now predicates hope ...
Frederick Douglass
#6. Vainly you talk about voting it down. When you have cast your millions of ballots, you have not reached the evil. It has fastened its root deep into the heart of the nation, and nothing but God's truth and love can cleanse the land. We must change the moral sentiment.
Frederick Douglass
#8. These were choice documents to me ... They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.
Frederick Douglass
#9. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!
Frederick Douglass
#11. The District of Columbia is the one spot where there is no government for the people, of the people and by the people.
Frederick Douglass
#12. Of whom I can say with a grateful heart, 'I was hungry, and he gave me meat; I was thirsty, and he gave me drink; I was a stranger, and he took me in.'
Frederick Douglass
#13. Every one of us should be ashamed to be free while his brother is a slave.
Frederick Douglass
#14. I ask you ... to adopt the principles proclaimed by yourselves, by your revolutionary fathers, and by the old bell in Independence Hall ...
Frederick Douglass
#15. No people to whom liberty is given can hold it as firmly and wear it as grandly as those who wrench their liberty from the iron hand of the tyrant.
Frederick Douglass
#16. I was in the midst of an ocean of my fellow-men, and yet a perfect stranger to every one.
Frederick Douglass
#17. This war, disguise it as they may, is virtually nothing more or less than perpetual slavery against universal freedoms.
Frederick Douglass
#18. A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnamity.
Frederick Douglass
#19. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.
Frederick Douglass
#21. A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar, - and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women, - before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.
Frederick Douglass
#22. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these excellent qualities, and her home of its early happiness. Conscience cannot stand much violence.
Frederick Douglass
#24. We are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men.
Frederick Douglass
#25. There is no negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution
Frederick Douglass
#26. Going to live at Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity.
Frederick Douglass
#27. Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic.
Frederick Douglass
#28. Slaves were expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave was not liked, either by masters or overseers.
Frederick Douglass
#29. Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
Frederick Douglass
#30. American labor rights activist, on activities of the National Farm Workers Association Human law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but human practice may.
Frederick Douglass
#31. We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil - she, as mistress, I, as slave.
Frederick Douglass
#32. I recognize the widest possible difference-so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other.
Frederick Douglass
#33. And stature commanding and exact - in intellect richly endowed - in natural eloquence a prodigy - in soul manifestly "created but a little lower than the angels" - yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave, - trembling for his safety, hardly daring to believe
Frederick Douglass
#35. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and never will. Show me the exact amount of wrong and injustices that are visited upon a person and I will show you the exact amount of words endured by these people.
Frederick Douglass
#37. You are not judged by the height you have risen, but from the depth you have climbed.
Frederick Douglass
#38. In all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line.
Frederick Douglass
#39. Who would be free themselves must strike the blow ... I urge you to fly to arms and smite to death the power that would bury the Government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave. This is your golden opportunity.
Frederick Douglass
#40. When I went into their family, it was the abode of happiness and contentment. The mistress of the house was a model of affection and tenderness. Her fervent piety and watchful uprightness made it impossible to see her without thinking and feeling - that woman is a Christian.
Frederick Douglass
#41. The table groans under the heavy and blood-bought luxuries gathered with painstaking care, at home and abroad. Fields, forests, rivers and seas, are made tributary here. Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste.
Frederick Douglass
#42. Welcome, welcome joy, welcome sorrow, welcome pleasure, welcome pain. You are all the ingredients of life -- and with you all, life is an inestimable blessing.
Frederick Douglass
#43. They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me ...
Frederick Douglass
#44. From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen.
Frederick Douglass
#45. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek.
Frederick Douglass
#46. I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and the ark of his safety.
Frederick Douglass
#47. No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
Frederick Douglass
#50. A government, founded on impartial liberty, where all have a voice and a vote, irrespective of color or of sex
what is there to hinder such a government from standing firm.
Frederick Douglass
#51. A war undertaken and brazenly carried for the perpetual enslavement of the colored men, calls logically and loudly for the colored men to help suppress it.
Frederick Douglass
#53. Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.
Frederick Douglass
#54. The Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider it purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? it is neither.
Frederick Douglass
#56. Poverty, ignorance and degradation are the combined evils, these constitute the social disease of the free colored people of the US.
Frederick Douglass
#57. Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.
Frederick Douglass
#59. Without any appeal to books, to laws, or to authorities of any kind, it was enough to accept God as a father, to regard slavery as a crime. I
Frederick Douglass
#60. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
Frederick Douglass
#61. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
Frederick Douglass
#62. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
Frederick Douglass
#63. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
Frederick Douglass
#64. When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world.
Frederick Douglass
#65. Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency;
Frederick Douglass
#66. Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste. Here, appetite, not food, is the great desideratum.
Frederick Douglass
#67. In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.
Frederick Douglass
#69. A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man
Frederick Douglass
#70. The more men you make free, the more freedom is strengthened, and the more men you give an interest in the welfare and safety of the State, the greater is the security of the State.
Frederick Douglass
#72. I expose slavery in this country, because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death.
Frederick Douglass
#74. Praying for freedom never did me any good til I started praying with my feet.
Frederick Douglass
#77. If the Negro knows enough to pay taxes to support the government, he knows enough to vote; taxation and representation should go together. If he knows enough to shoulder a musket and fight for the flag, fight for the government, he knows enough to vote.
Frederick Douglass
#78. The American people have this to learn: that where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither person nor property is safe.
Frederick Douglass
#79. It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
Frederick Douglass
#80. A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.
Frederick Douglass
#81. Should a slave, when assaulted, but raise his hand in self defense, the white assaulting party is fully justified by southern, or Maryland, public opinion, in shooting the slave down.
Frederick Douglass
#82. The control of events has been taken out of our hands ... we have fallen into the mighty current of eternal principles-invisible forces-which are shaping and fashioning events as they wish, using us only as instruments to work out their own results in our national destiny.
Frederick Douglass
#83. Man's greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.
Frederick Douglass
#84. Educate your sons and daughters, send them to school, and show them that beside the cartridge box, the ballot box, and the jury box, you also have the knowledge box.
Frederick Douglass
#86. I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave.
Frederick Douglass
#88. Poets, prophets and reformers are all picture-makers -- and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction,
Frederick Douglass
#89. What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.
Frederick Douglass
#90. They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.
Frederick Douglass
#91. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
Frederick Douglass
#92. Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Frederick Douglass
#93. They'll read and sing a sacred song,
And make a prayer both loud and long,
And teach the right and do the wrong,
Hailing htthe brother, sister, throng,
With words of heavenly union.
Frederick Douglass
#95. A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.
Frederick Douglass
#96. Despite of it all, the Negro remains ... cool, strong, imperturbable, and cheerful.
Frederick Douglass
#97. As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them, so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate.
Frederick Douglass
#99. Some know the value of education by having it. I know it's value by not having it.
Frederick Douglass
#100. The silver trump of freedom roused in my soul eternal wakefulness.
Frederick Douglass
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