Frederick Douglass

The man who is right is a majority. He who has God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe. Though he does not represent the present state, he represents the future state. If he does not represent what we are, he represents what we ought to be.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham.

[ On the proposal to send American blacks to colonize Liberia :] Our minds are made up to live here if we can, or die here if we must; so every attempt to remove us will be, as it ought to be, labor lost. Here we are, and here we shall remain.

No, I make no pretension to patriotism. So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.

You have seen how a man was made a slave;

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

Having despised us, it is not strange that Americans should seek to render us despicable; having enslaved us, it is natural that they should strive to prove us unfit for freedom; having denounced us as indolent, it is not strange that they should cripple our enterprises.

He is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins. It is righteousness that exalteth a nation while sin is a reproach to any people.

A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.

It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself.

Without a struggle, there can be no progress.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.

People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet renounce controversy are people who want crops without ploughing the ground.

If the negro knows enough to fight for his country he knows enough to vote; if he knows enough to pay taxes for the support of the government, he knows enough to vote; if he knows as much when sober, as an Irishman knows when drunk, he knows enough to vote.

All great qualities are never found in any one man or in any one race. The whole of humanity, like the whole of everything else, is ever greater than a part. Men only know themselves by knowing others, and contact is essential to this knowledge.

No man can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon the thought, feeling and action of others, and who has himself no means in his own hands for guarding, protecting, defending and maintaining that liberty.

Though they come as the waves come, we shall be all the stronger if we receive them as friends and give them a reason for loving our country and our institutions.

If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation.

The Constitution itself. Its language is 'we the people'. Not we the white people, not even we the citizens, not we the privileged class, not we the high, not we the low, but we the people.

Opportunity is important but exertion is indispensable.

For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. 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 proclaimed and denounced.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery

The ground which a colored man occupies in this country is, every inch of it, sternly disputed.

Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.

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.

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

Intelligence is a great leveler here as elsewhere

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave

Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.