Quotes by Frederick Douglass

“If there is no struggle there is no progress.”

“These dear souls came not to Sabbath school because it was popular to do so, nor did I teach them because it was reputable to be thus engaged. Every moment they spent in that school, they were liab...”

“Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the pres...”

“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”

“I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition t...”

“At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon the slave and slaveholder.”

“They suppress the truth rather than take the consequence of telling it, and in so doing prove themselves a part of the human family.”

“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.”

“Everybody has asked the question. . ."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....”

“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 rap...”

“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.”

“From apparently the basest metals we have the finest toned bells.”

“To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to det...”

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

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

“Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency;”

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

“For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.”

“...I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land... I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of ...”

“I have observed this in my experience of slavery, - that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking...”