Frederick Douglass Quotes

"In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky-her grand old woods-her fertile fields-her beautiful rivers-her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave-holding and wrong; When I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten; That her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing."

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

"The soul that is within me no man can degrade."

"When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind."

"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."

"The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous."

"The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery."

"The chance is now given you to end in a day the bondage of centuries, and to rise in one bound from social degradation to the place of common equality with all other varieties of men"

"The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion."

"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 man's character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him."

"One and God make a majority."

"To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."

"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 persons nor property will be safe."

"I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave."

"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"

"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."

"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs."

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress."

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