Frederick Douglass Quotes
140 Frederick Douglass Quotes
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I have sometimes thought, that the mere hearing of these songs would do more to impress truly spiritual-minded men and women with the soul crushing and death-dealing character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of its mere physical cruelties. They speak to the heart and to the soul of the thoughtful.
Frederick Douglass
Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.
Frederick Douglass
Only as we rise… do we encounter opposition.
Frederick Douglass
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man, without at least finding the other end of it about his own neck.
Frederick Douglass
Man’s own greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.
Frederick Douglass
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
They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.
Frederick Douglass
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1894] A hundred white men will attend a concert of white Negro minstrels with faces blackened with burnt cork, to one who will attend a lecture by an intelligent Negro.
Frederick Douglass
If you wish to make your son helpless, you need not cripple him with bullet or bludgeon, but simply place him beyond the reach of necessity and surround him with ease and luxury. This experiment has often been tried and has seldom failed.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1846] I think I may boldly tell you that I am a republican, but not an American republican. I am here as reviler of American republicanism.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1846] Aside from slavery I regard America as a brilliant example to the world; only wash from her escutcheon the bloody stain of slavery, and she will stand forth as a noble example for others to follow. But as long as the tears of my sisters and brother continue to run down her streams unheeded into the vast ocean of human misery, my tongue shall cleave to the roof of my mouth ere I speak as well of such a nation.
Frederick Douglass
You may hurl a man so low, beneath the level of his kind, that he loses all just ideas of his natural position; but elevate him a little, and the clear conception of rights rises to life and power, and leads him onward.
Frederick Douglass
To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason.
Frederick Douglass
If there be one crevice through which a single drop may fall, it will certainly rust off the slave’s chains.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1845] On the one hand, there stood slavery, a stern reality, glaring frightfully upon us, - its robes already crimsoned with the blood of millions, and even now feasting itself greedily upon our own flesh. On the other hand, away back in the dim distance, under the flickering light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-covered mountain, stood a doubtful freedom – half frozen – beckoning us to come and share its hospitality.
Frederick Douglass
The grand aim of slavery, which always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family as an institution.
Frederick Douglass
Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brothers and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.
Frederick Douglass
Slavery has no use for either fathers or families, and its laws do not recognize their existence in the social arrangements of the plantation.
Frederick Douglass
A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnanimity. Men do not love those who remind them of their sins – unless they have a mind to repent – and the mulatto child’s face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child.
Frederick Douglass
It is one of the damning characteristics of the slave system, that it robs its victims of every earthly incentive to a holy life.
Frederick Douglass
The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. Slaveholders have made it almost impossible for the slave to commit any crime, know either to the laws of God or to the laws of man.
Frederick Douglass
If he knows as much when sober as an Irishman knows when drunk, he knows enough to vote.
Frederick Douglass
If he knows enough to take up arms in defense of this government, and bare his breast to the storm of rebel artillery, he knows enough to vote.
Frederick Douglass
In a republican country where general suffrage is the rule, without the ballot personal liberty and other foregoing rights become mere privileges held at the option of others.
Frederick Douglass
If a Negro knows enough to pay taxes, he knows enough to vote.
Frederick Douglass
If he knows enough to commit crime and to be hanged or imprisoned, he knows enough to vote.
Frederick Douglass
If he knows enough to fight for his country when assailed by invasion from abroad, or rebellion at home, he knows enough to vote.
Frederick Douglass
If we know enough to be hung, we know enough to vote.
Frederick Douglass
If the Negro knows enough to pay taxes to support the government, he knows enough to vote – taxation and representation should go together.
Frederick Douglass
If he knows enough to shoulder a musket and fight for the flag, fight for the government, he knows enough to vote.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1865] Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot. While the legislatures of the South retain the right to pass laws making any discrimination between black and white, slavery still lives there.
Frederick Douglass
If the elective franchise is not extended to the Negro, he dies – he is exterminated.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1854] The history of the Negro race proves them to be wonderfully adapted to all countries, all climates, and all conditions. Their tenacity of life, their powers of endurance, their malleable toughness, would almost imply especial interposition on their behalf. The tend thousand horrors of slavery, striking hard upon the sensitive soul, have bruised, and battered, and stung, but have not killed. The poor bondman lifts a smiling face above the surface of a sea of agonies, hoping on, hoping ever. His tawny brother, the Indian, dies, under the flashing glance of the Anglo-Saxon. Not so the Negro; civilization cannot kill him. He accepts it – becomes part of it.
Frederick Douglass
Anything which looks to assisting the helpless, has my heart and has my hand.
Frederick Douglass
Unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence.
Frederick Douglass
We drink freely of the water at the marble fountain, without thinking for the assessment of the toil and skill displayed in constructing the fountain itself.
Frederick Douglass
Nothing valuable shall be obtained without labor and agony.
Frederick Douglass
Work for money and save it when you get it… We can work, and the grateful earth yields as readily and as bountifully to the touch of black industry as of white. We can work, and by this means we can retrieve all of our losses.
Frederick Douglass
The general sentiment of mankind is, that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, nor put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. Such a man the world says, may lay down until he has sense enough to stand up. It is useless and cruel to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought against a curb-stone.
Frederick Douglass
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