Quotes About Frederick Douglass

#1. In every era going back to Lincoln with Frederick Douglass, presidents talk to those that were leading at that time.

Al Sharpton

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

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

Juan Williams

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

Harold Holzer

#7. As Frederick Douglass said, "If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Joshua Wolf Shenk

#8. 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

#9. Thinking about justice and mercy and grace, Frederick Douglass said, "I prayed for twenty years. Nothing happened until I got off my knees and started marching with my feet." And that's the role of the church. We already prayed about it. Now let's take action on it. You

Sybrina Fulton

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. The problem with relegating black history to one really short month, the shortest month, is not only are we telling the same stories over and over again - which are amazing, George Washington Carver is incredible, there's nobody like Frederick Douglass - but there are so many.

Karyn Parsons

#13. Now and always, we expect to insist upon it that we are Americans, that America is our native land; that this is our home; that we are American citizens . . . and that it is the duty of the American people so to recognize us. - FREDERICK DOUGLASS A

Elizabeth Dowling Taylor

#14. As I grew older, my love for reading grew stronger. I read with studious interest everything I could find relating to colored men who had gained prominence. My heroes had been King David, then Robert the Bruce; now Frederick Douglass was enshrined in the place of honor.

James Weldon Johnson

#15. Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

John Legend

#16. My mother introduced me to more academic-minded writers, Cornel West and Skip Gates. In her library, I came across, when I was very young, Harold Cruse's 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,' which is like a bible of Negro intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka.

Rashid Johnson

#17. But believe it or not, I really do like to read. I don't think anyone can ever pull the wool over your eyes if you stay prayed up and read. Frederick Douglass said that no man can be a slave if he has knowledge.

Brandi L. Bates

#18. I'm hopeful that at the end of my life, someone like Frederick Douglass would look at my life and say, 'Well done: you've proven yourself to be worthy of the legacy we left you.'

Cory Booker

#19. 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

#20. William Lloyd Garrison was up there with Frederick Douglass being thrown off trains and going through what happened in the 1960s in 1840 in Boston.

Rand Paul

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. It is the mission of the printer to diffuse light and knowledge by a judicious intermingling of black with white.

Frederick Douglass

#25. Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.

Frederick Douglass

#26. 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

#27. Be not discouraged. There is a future for you ... The resistance encountered now predicates hope ...

Frederick Douglass

#28. 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

#29. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.

Frederick Douglass

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!

Frederick Douglass

#33. 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

#34. You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

Frederick Douglass

#35. The destiny of the colored American ... is the destiny of America.

Frederick Douglass

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. I will give Mr. Freeland the credit of being the best master I ever had, till I became my own master.

Frederick Douglass

#39. 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

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

Frederick Douglass

#41. 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

#42. I will unite with anyone to do good, but with no one to do harm.

Frederick Douglass

#43. It's a poor rule that won't work both ways.

Frederick Douglass

#44. Yet people in general will say they like colored men as well as any other, but in their proper place.

Frederick Douglass

#45. Heaven's blessing must attend all, and freedom must soon be given to the pining millions under a ruthless bondage.

Frederick Douglass

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. Every one of us should be ashamed to be free while his brother is a slave.

Frederick Douglass

#52. 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

#53. From apparently the basest metals we have the finest toned bells.

Frederick Douglass

#54. I ask you ... to adopt the principles proclaimed by yourselves, by your revolutionary fathers, and by the old bell in Independence Hall ...

Frederick Douglass

#55. It's easier to build strong children then repair broken men.

Frederick Douglass

#56. 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

#57. I was in the midst of an ocean of my fellow-men, and yet a perfect stranger to every one.

Frederick Douglass

#58. I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.

Frederick Douglass

#59. The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

Frederick Douglass

#60. 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

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

Frederick Douglass

#62. Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.

Frederick Douglass

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

Frederick Douglass

#64. The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected.

Frederick Douglass

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. One and God make a majority.

Frederick Douglass

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. Oppression makes a wise man mad.

Frederick Douglass

#71. And in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty.

Frederick Douglass

#72. 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

#73. A man's rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.

Frederick Douglass

#74. What is possible for me is possible for you.

Frederick Douglass

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.

Frederick Douglass

#78. Without a struggle, there can be no progress.

Frederick Douglass

#79. 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

#80. Going to live at Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity.

Frederick Douglass

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

Frederick Douglass

#82. They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.

Frederick Douglass

#83. Slaves were expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave was not liked, either by masters or overseers.

Frederick Douglass

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. It is better to be part of a great whole than to be the whole of a small part.

Frederick Douglass

#87. 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

#88. We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil - she, as mistress, I, as slave.

Frederick Douglass

#89. The mind does not take its complexion from the skin ...

Frederick Douglass

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. Without Struggle There Is No Success

Frederick Douglass

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. Our destiny is largely in our hands.

Frederick Douglass

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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