Quotes About Douglass Slavery

#1. 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

#2. His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom.

Colum McCann

#3. The Federal Government was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government.

Frederick Douglass

#4. Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

Frederick Douglass

#5. At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon the slave and slaveholder.

Frederick Douglass

#6. For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.

Frederick Douglass

#7. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

Frederick Douglass

#8. Abolition of slavery had been the deepest desire and the great labor of my life

Frederick Douglass

#9. Mark Twain married the daughter of one of New York State's leading Abolitionists, Jervis Langdon, who helped Frederick Douglass who became the great Negro leader to escape from slavery.

Hal Holbrook

#10. Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

Frederick Douglass

#11. 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

#12. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.

Frederick Douglass

#13. I escaped from slavery and became a leading abolitionist and speaker.

Frederick Douglass

#14. 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

#15. It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the scale of humanity than the slaves of African descent.

Frederick Douglass

#16. The reformer," Douglass explained in 1883, had "a difficult and disagreeable task before him. He has to part with old friends; break away from the beaten paths of society, and advance against the vehement protests of the most sacred sentiments of the human heart.

James Oakes

#17. 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

#18. I hear the mournful wail of millions!

Frederick Douglass

#19. Slavery appears such a relatively mild business that one begins to wonder why Frederick Douglass and so many others ever tried to escape.

Dinesh D'Souza

#20. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness.

Frederick Douglass

#21. Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic.

Frederick Douglass

#22. The author said Frederick Douglass described himself as a "graduate" of slavery with the marks of his diploma on his back.

Harold Holzer

#23. Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery.

Juan Williams

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnamity.

Frederick Douglass

#27. This war, disguise it as they may, is virtually nothing more or less than perpetual slavery against universal freedoms.

Frederick Douglass

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.

Frederick Douglass