Frederick Douglass Quotes
20 quotes from Frederick Douglass — Escaped slave who became the most prominent abolitionist leader in America..
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”
“The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.”
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
“The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes the rebellion.”
“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.”
“A man's rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.”
“One and God make a majority.”
“You are loosed 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 round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing!”
“Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?”
“If our action shall be in accordance with the principles of justice, liberty, and perfect human equality, no eloquence can adequately portray the greatness and grandeur of the Republic. We shall mould them all, each after his kind, into Americans; Indian and Celt, negro and Saxon, Latin and Teuton, Mongolian and Caucasian, Jew and gentile, all shall bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.”
“I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.”
“The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.”
“I was nothing before; I WAS A MAN NOW. It recalled to life my crushed self-respect and my self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed determination to be a FREEMAN.”
“There can be no right where any man however lifted up or humble, however young or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.”
“Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places, and it is never more proper and beautiful in any case than when speaking of a great public man.”
