Frederick Douglass Quotes
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From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen.
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It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
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Gentleman, I am a republican, a radical republican, a Black republican, a republican dyed in the wool, and for one I want the republican party to live as long as I do… It is the party of law and order, of liberty and progress, of honor and honesty, as against disloyalty, moral stagnation, dishonest voting, and repudiation.
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I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.
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A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.
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Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
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A man's right to speak does not depend upon where he was born or upon his color. The simple quality of manhood is the solid basis of the right - and there let it rest forever.
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The principle must rest upon its own proper basis.
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There must be no concessions to the enemy. When a man is allowed to speak because he is rich and powerful, it aggravates the crime of denying the right to the poor and humble.
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No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
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It is not true that the Republican party has not endeavored to protect the negro in his right to vote. The whole moral power of the party has been, from first to last, on the side of justice to the negro; and it has only been baffled, in its efforts to protect the negro in his vote, by the Democratic party.
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His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine - it was as the burning sun to my taper light - mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.
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I assure you, that this inestimable memento of his Excellency will be retained in my possession while I live - an object of sacred interest - a token not merely of the kind consideration in which I have reason to know that the President was pleased to hold me personally, but as an indication of his humane interest in the welfare of my whole race.
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I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
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I hold that women, as well as men, have the right to vote, and my heart and my voice go with the movement to extend suffrage to woman.
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There is something about Hayti which we have to deplore, and so there is about the United States. Let us go back 100 years and look at Hayti, and we find it surrounded by slavery and the whole Caribbean Sea reddened by the curse.
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The truth is, the people here know nothing of the republican Negro hate prevalent in our glorious land. They measure and esteem men according to their moral and intellectual worth, and not according to the color of their skin. Whatever may be said of the aristocracies here, there is none based on the color of a man's skin.
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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.
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Personal independence is a virtue and it is the soul out of which comes the sturdiest manhood. But there can be no independence without a large share of self-dependence, and this virtue cannot be bestowed. It must be developed from within.
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Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
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The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery.
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My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and 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. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.
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We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.
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Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.