Top 35 Frederick Douglass Quotes

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

What to the Slave is the 4th of July.

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.

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

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

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.

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

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

That which is inhuman cannot be divine.

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

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

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

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.

Experience demonstrates that there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.

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

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

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

There is not a man beneath the canopy of Heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man’s political hopes and the ark of his safety.

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

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

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

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

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

Man’s greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.

I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.

Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.