Frederick Douglass Quotes
140 Frederick Douglass Quotes
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There are three special explanations given as to the cause of success in self-made men. The first attributed to such men superior mental endowments, and assigned this as the true explanation of success. The second made the most of circumstances, favoring opportunities, accidents, chances etc. The third made industry and application the great secret of success. All had truth in them, and all were capable of being pressed into untruth.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1865] The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us… 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 Do nothing with us! … And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, - don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him alone! If you see him going to the ballot box, let him alone! - don’t disturb him! If you see him going into a workshop, just let him alone, - your interference is doing him positive injury.
Frederick Douglass
My politics in regard to the Negro is simply this: Give him fair play and let him alone, but be sure you give him fair play.
Frederick Douglass
Properly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-made men. The term implies an individual independence of the past and present which can never exist.
Frederick Douglass
One generation cannot safely rest on the achievements of another, and ought not so to rest.
Frederick Douglass
All good causes are mutually helpful. The benefits accruing from this movement for the equal rights of woman are not confined or limited to woman only. They will be shared by every effort to promote the progress and welfare of mankind everywhere and in all ages.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1846] Long experience has confirmed me in the opinion that, however cold and indifferent to human suffering however dead and stone-like, the heart of man may, under the influence or sordid avarice, become the heart of a woman is ever warm, tenderly alive, and throbs in deepest sympathy with the sorrows and sufferings of every class, color, and clime over the globe. She is the last to inflict injury and the first to repair it. If she is ever found in the ranks of the enemies of freedom, she is there at the bidding of man, and in open disobedience to his own noble nature.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1846] I have no protection at home, or resting-place abroad. The land of my birth welcomes me to her shores only as a slave, and spurns with contempt the idea of treating me differently. So that 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.’ That men should be patriotic is to me perfectly natural; and as a philosophical fact, I am able to give it an intellectual recognition. But no further can I go. If ever I had any patriotism, or any capacity for the feeling, it was whipt out of me long since by the last of the American soul-drivers.
Frederick Douglass
[On Hayti (Haiti)] We are not to judge her by the height which the Anglo-Saxon has reached. We are to judge by the depths from which she has come.
Frederick Douglass
In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky – her grand old woods – her fertile fields – her beautiful rivers – her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1863] The relation between the white and colored people of this country is the great, paramount, imperative, and all-commanding question for this age and the nation to solve.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1860] The very best that can be said of [the Republican] party is, that it is opposed to forcing slavery into any territory of the United States where the white people of that territory do not want it… That party… is simply opposed to allowing slavery to go where it is not at all likely to go.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1861] If the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders, if it can only be stuck together and held together by a new drain on the negro’s blood, if the North is to forswear the exercise of all rights incompatible with the safety and perpetuity of slavery… then will every right minded man and woman in the land say, let the Union perish, and perish forever.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1861 on the Union’s refusal to enlist African Americans] The national edifice is on fire. Every man who can carry a bucket of water, or remove a brick, is wanted, but those who have the care of the building, having a profound respect for the feeling of the national burglars who set the building on fire, are determined that the flames shall only be extinguished by Indo-Caucasian hands, and to have the building burnt rather than save it by means of any other. Such is the pride, the stupid prejudice and folly that rules the hour.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1863] Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.
Frederick Douglass
You are loosened from your moorings, and are free, I am fast in my chains and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly around the world, I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of the gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! Betwixt me and you, the turbid waters flow. Go on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute!
Frederick Douglass
[In 1863 on the Union’s refusal to allow African American soldiers to be officers] To say we won’t be soldiers because we cannot be colonels is like saying we won’t go into the water till we have learned to swim.
Frederick Douglass
I would welcome the intelligence tomorrow… that the slaves had risen in the South.
Frederick Douglass
She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness.
Frederick Douglass
There is in him the union of head and heart, which is indispensable to an enlightenment of the heads and a winning of the hearts of others.
Frederick Douglass
It neither made him to be humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them.
Frederick Douglass
I am not sure that I was not under the influence of something like a slavish adoration of my Boston friends, and I labored hard to convince them of the wisdom of my undertaking, but without success.
Frederick Douglass
Truth is proper and beautiful in all times and all places.
Frederick Douglass
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
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
Rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.
Frederick Douglass
The destiny of colored Americans, is the destiny of America. We shall never leave you.
Frederick Douglass
Slaves are expected to sing as well as work.
Frederick Douglass
The songs of the slave, represent his sorrows, rather than the joys, of his heart.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1890] I have seen dark hours in my life, and I have seen the darkness gradually disappearing, and the light gradually increasing. One by one, I have seen obstacles removed, errors corrected, prejudices softened, proscriptions relinquished, and my people advancing in all the elements that make up the sum of general welfare.
Frederick Douglass
[In 1890] Whatever delays, disappointments and discouragements may come, truth, justice, liberty and humanity will prevail.
Frederick Douglass
It has been a source of great annoyance to me, never to have a birthday.
Frederick Douglass
[On first being read to] I remember sympathy for the good old man [in the story], and my anxiety to learn more about him led me to ask my mistress to teach me to read.
Frederick Douglass
The over-work, and the brutal chastisement, combined with that ever-gnawing and soul-devouring thought, ‘I am a slave – a slave for life – a slave with no rational ground to hope for freedom,’ rendered me a living embodiment of mental and physical wretchedness.
Frederick Douglass
The idea of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous; for upon these conditions depends the life of its life.
Frederick Douglass
Slavery and the Church were side by side: the Church was at peace with slavery: men were sold to build churches, women sold to pay missionaries, and children sold to buy bibles. We did right to oppose it.
Frederick Douglass
My hands were no longer tied by my religion.
Frederick Douglass
I shall stand it no longer.
Frederick Douglass
[On never being whipped again by his master after he stood up for himself.] A freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form.
Frederick Douglass
All true reforms are kindred.
Frederick Douglass
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