85 Frederick Douglass Quotes

One of the leaders of the American civil rights movement in the 19th century, Frederick Douglass is famous for his oratory and writing regarding slavery.

A former slave himself, Douglass published several books, including Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

We captured some of the best quotes from Frederick Douglass, a man who was an integral part of American history.

image shows a black and white drawing of Frederick Douglass surrounded by a white oval and on top of a dark green background for a Skip to my Lou quotes blog. — We have some thought-provoking Frederick Douglass quotes for you to ponder over!

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
“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.”
“The American people have this to learn: that where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither person nor property is safe.”
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
“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.”
“A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.”
“A man is worked upon by what he works on. He may carve out his circumstances, but his circumstances will carve him out as well.”
“The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.”
“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.”
“Some know the value of education by having it. I know it’s value by not having it.”
“A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man”
“The soul that is within me no man can degrade.”
“The man who is right is a majority. He who has God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe.”
“The silver trump of freedom roused in my soul eternal wakefulness.”
“A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnanimity.”
“Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.”
“My hopes were never brighter than now.”
“Our destiny is largely in our hands.”
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.”
“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.”
“We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.”
“Experience is a keen teacher;”
“I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.”
“Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste. Here, appetite, not food, is the great desideratum.”
“Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren”
“Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and never will. Show me the exact amount of wrong and injustices that are visited upon a person and I will show you the exact amount of words endured by these people.”
“One and God make a majority.”
“The thought of only being a creature of the present and past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think, and to speak.”
“Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency;”
“To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.”
“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.”
“There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”
“When I went into their family, it was the abode of happiness and contentment. The mistress of the house was a model of affection and tenderness. Her fervent piety and watchful uprightness made it impossible to see her without thinking and feeling—”that woman is a Christian.”
“I had a wholesome dread of the consequences of running in debt.”
“Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free.”
“From apparently the basest metals we have the finest toned bells.”
“I had reached the point, at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a Freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form,”
He who despairs of progress despises the hope of the world, and shuts himself out from the chief significance of assistance — and is dead while he lives.”
“Inaction is followed by stagnation. Stagnation is followed by pestilence and pestilence is followed by death.”
“You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, but I am a slave for life! Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?”
“For no man who lives at all lives unto himself. He either helps or hinders all who are in anywise connected to him.”
“As a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor.”
“Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers over the country and poisons more or less the moral atmosphere of all sections of the republic.”
“They are thought pictures — the outstanding headlands of the meandering shores of life, and are points to steer by on the broad sea of thought and experience. They body forth in living forms and colors the ever varying lights and shadows of the soul.”
“Reader! Are you with the man-stealers in sympathy and purpose, or on the side of their down-trodden victims? If with the former, then you are the foe of God and man.”
“Stars shall fall from heaven.”
“Such are the limitations of the common mind, and so thoroughly engrossing are the cares of common life, that only the few among men can discern through the glitter and dazzle of present prosperity the dark outlines of approaching disasters, even though they may have come up to our very gates, and are already within striking distance. The yawning seam and corroded bolt conceal their defects from the mariner until the storm calls all hands to the pumps.”
“A man’s rights rest in three boxes. The ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box.”
“Truth shines with brighter light and intenser heat at every moment, and a country torn and rent and bleeding implores relief from its distress and agony.”
“There is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.”
“To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
“The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.”
“I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.”
“The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think , and to speak.”
“A man without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him.”
“They were great in their day and generation.”
“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”
“…the American people are disposed often to be generous rather than just.”
“Alas! I had not then learned the measure of “man’s inhumanity to man,” nor to what limitless extent of wickedness he will go for the love of gain.”
“My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”
“The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. . . .Make a man a slave, and you rob him of moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability.”
“Men talk much of a new birth. The fact is fundamental. But the mistake is in treating it as an incident which can only happen to a man once in a lifetime: whereas the whole journey of life is a succession of them. A new life springs up in the soul with the discovery of every new agency by which the soul is raised to a higher level of wisdom: goodness and joy.”
“Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild. Like the fires of the prairie, once lighted, they are at the mercy of every wind, and must burn, till they have consumed all that is combustible within their remorseless grasp.”
“The man who will get up will be helped up; and the man who will not get up will be allowed to stay down.”
“Give me the making of a nation’s ballads and I care not who has the making of its Laws.”
“In what new skin will the old snake come forth?”
“I have often been asked how I felt when first I found myself on free soil. There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath and the “quick round of blood,” I lived more in that one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe.”
“I was in the midst of an ocean of my fellow-men, and yet a perfect stranger to every one.”
“At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon the slave and slaveholder.”
“When I think that these precious souls are to-day shut up in the prison-house of slavery, my feelings overcome me, and I am almost ready to ask, “Does a righteous God govern the universe? and for what does he hold the thunders in his right hand, if not to smite the oppressor, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the spoiler?”
“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.”
“The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins-and her worst enemy who, under specious…..garb of patriotism seeks to excuse.palliate or defend them.”
“Geological trees do not flourish among slaves.”
“They are always ready to sacrifice, but seldom to show mercy.”
“But I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.”
“A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.”
“Conscience is, to the individual soul, and to society, what the law of gravitation is to the universe. It holds society together; it is the basis of all trust and confidence; it is the pillar of all moral rectitude. Without it, suspicion would take the place of trust; vice would be more than a match for virtue; men would prey upon each other, like the wild beasts of the desert; and earth would become a hell.”
“I am opposed to war, because I am a believer in Christianity. … I believe, if there is one thing more than another that has brought reproach upon the Christian religion, it is the spirit of war.”
“America will not allow her children to love her. She seems bent on compelling those who would be her warmest friends, to be her worst enemies.”
“I esteem myself a good, persistent hater of injustice and oppression, but my resentment ceases when they cease, and I have no heart to visit upon children the sins of their fathers.”
“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others.”
“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”

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