Top 100 Douglass Frederick 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
#6. I do not think much of the good luck theory of self-made men. It is worth but little attention and has no practical value.
Frederick Douglass
#7. Be not discouraged. There is a future for you ... The resistance encountered now predicates hope ...
Frederick Douglass
#8. The sunlight that has brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.
Frederick Douglass
#10. We are Americans, speaking the same language, adopting the same customs, holding the same general opinions ... and shall rise and fall with Americans.
Frederick Douglass
#11. 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
#12. We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!
Frederick Douglass
#13. There is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.
Frederick Douglass
#14. You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.
Frederick Douglass
#15. The destiny of the colored American ... is the destiny of America.
Frederick Douglass
#16. There are at present many Coloured men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and labourers, but real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets.
Frederick Douglass
#17. I have no protection at home, or resting place abroad ... I am an outcast from the society of my childhood, and an outlaw in the land of my birth. I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were.
Frederick Douglass
#18. I will give Mr. Freeland the credit of being the best master I ever had, till I became my own master.
Frederick Douglass
#19. 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
#20. In every era going back to Lincoln with Frederick Douglass, presidents talk to those that were leading at that time.
Al Sharpton
#22. 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
#25. Yet people in general will say they like colored men as well as any other, but in their proper place.
Frederick Douglass
#26. Heaven's blessing must attend all, and freedom must soon be given to the pining millions under a ruthless bondage.
Frederick Douglass
#27. In the struggle for justice, the only reward is the opportunity to be in the struggle. You can't expect that you're going to have it tomorrow. You just have to keep working on it.
Frederick Douglass
#28. Money is the measure of morality, and the success or failure of slavery as a money-making system, determines with many whether ... it should be maintained or abolished.
Frederick Douglass
#29. The United States of Andrew Jackson or George Washington is not the United States of Frederick Douglass or Sitting Bull. But we present our history from the perspective of the winners, from those in power
Chris Hedges
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.
Frederick Douglass
#33. Every one of us should be ashamed to be free while his brother is a slave.
Frederick Douglass
#34. The relation between the white and colored people of this country is the great, paramount, imperative, and all-commanding question for this age and nation to solve.
Frederick Douglass
#36. I ask you ... to adopt the principles proclaimed by yourselves, by your revolutionary fathers, and by the old bell in Independence Hall ...
Frederick Douglass
#38. 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
#39. I was in the midst of an ocean of my fellow-men, and yet a perfect stranger to every one.
Frederick Douglass
#40. Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.'
Maya Angelou
#41. I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.
Frederick Douglass
#43. Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.
Frederick Douglass
#44. Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.
Carl Sagan
#45. This war, disguise it as they may, is virtually nothing more or less than perpetual slavery against universal freedoms.
Frederick Douglass
#47. A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnamity.
Frederick Douglass
#48. The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected.
Frederick Douglass
#49. 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
#50. How do you feel," said a friend to me, "when you are hooted and jeered on the street on account of your color?" "I feel as if an ass had kicked, but had hit nobody," was my answer.
Frederick Douglass
#52. 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
#53. In a composite nation like ours, as before the law, there should be no rich, no poor, no high, no low, no white, no black, but common country, common citizenship, equal rights and a common destiny.
Frederick Douglass
#56. 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
#57. Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery.
Juan Williams
#58. A man's rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.
Frederick Douglass
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.
Frederick Douglass
#64. The author said Frederick Douglass described himself as a "graduate" of slavery with the marks of his diploma on his back.
Harold Holzer
#65. You degrade us and then ask why we are degraded. You shut our mouths and ask why we don't speak. You close your colleges and seminaries against us and then ask why we don't know.
Frederick Douglass
#66. As Frederick Douglass said, "If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Joshua Wolf Shenk
#67. Going to live at Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity.
Frederick Douglass
#68. Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic.
Frederick Douglass
#69. They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.
Frederick Douglass
#70. Slaves were expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave was not liked, either by masters or overseers.
Frederick Douglass
#71. 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
#72. I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.
Frederick Douglass
#73. It is better to be part of a great whole than to be the whole of a small part.
Frederick Douglass
#74. 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
#75. We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil - she, as mistress, I, as slave.
Frederick Douglass
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. What upon Earth is the matter with the American people? Do they really covet the world's ridicule as well as their own social and political ruin?
Frederick Douglass
#81. The Christianity of America is a Christianity, of whose votaries it may be as truly said, as it was of the ancient scribes and Pharisees, 'They bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.
Frederick Douglass
#82. I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class.
Frederick Douglass
#83. what still more shocking outrages were perpetrated upon his mind! with all his noble powers and sublime aspirations, how like a brute was he treated, even by those professing to have the same mind in them that was in Christ Jesus! to what dreadful liabilities was he continually subjected!
Frederick Douglass
#85. 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
#86. This will be seen by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves spend those days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of their ending as of their beginning. Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation.
Frederick Douglass
#87. A man without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him.
Frederick Douglass
#89. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness.
Frederick Douglass
#91. You are not judged by the height you have risen, but from the depth you have climbed.
Frederick Douglass
#92. In all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line.
Frederick Douglass
#93. 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
#94. We look at the legacy of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells and Ella Baker, Malcolm X and Martin King. We have, and part of the struggle now in the age of [Barack] Obama is how do we keep alive the legacy of Martin King?
Cornel West
#95. The man who will get up will be helped up; and the man who will not get up will be allowed to stay down.
Frederick Douglass
#96. Most successful one was that of tarring his fence all around; after which, if a slave was caught
Frederick Douglass
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. But I should be false in the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.
Frederick Douglass
#100. Having despised us, it is not strange that Americans should seek to render us despicable; having enslaved us, it is natural that they should strive to prove us unfit for freedom; having denounced us as indolent, it is not strange that they should cripple our enterprises.
Frederick Douglass
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