Frederick Douglass Quotes
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People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.
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A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.
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Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
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I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and the ark of his safety.
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I believe in individuality, but individuals are, to the mass, like waves to the ocean. The highest order of genius is as dependent as is the lowest.
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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.
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Slavery has left behind it a spirit that still delights in human blood. Outrage, murder, and assassination are the inheritance of the freed men and women of the South. Neither our government nor our civilization seems able to stop the flow of blood. As in the time of slavery, the Church is silent.
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The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
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Shoot down the Confederacy and uphold the flag; the American flag.
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America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
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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.
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This war, let it be long or let it be short, let it cost much or let it cost little... shall not cease until every freedman at the South has the right to vote.
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A man's character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him.
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I say nothing of father, for he is shrouded in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate. Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families. Slavery has no use for either fathers or families, and its laws do not recognize their existence in the social arrangements of the plantation.
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Jefferson was not ashamed to call the black man his brother and to address him as a gentleman.
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What to the Slave is the 4th of July.
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The Constitution of the United States knows no distinction between citizens on account of color.
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If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
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Those unknown heroes whose whitened bones have been piously gathered here, and whose green graves we now strew with sweet and beautiful flowers, choice emblems alike of pure hearts and brave spirits, reached, in their glorious career that last highest point of nobleness beyond which human power cannot go. They died for their country.
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Detraction paves the way for the very perfections which it doubts and denies.
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Old as the everlasting hills; immovable as the throne of God; and certain as the purposes of eternal power, against all hinderances, and against all delays, and despite all the mutations of human instrumentalities, it is the faith of my soul, that this anti-slavery cause will triumph.
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In the United States, the slightest infusion of Teutonic blood is thought to be sufficient to account for any considerable degree of intelligence found under any possible color of the skin.
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The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.
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The ground which a colored man occupies in this country is, every inch of it, sternly disputed.