Top 280 Frederick Douglass Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.”

— Frederick Douglass

102. “I do not think much of the good luck theory of self-made men. It is worth but little attention and has no practical value.”

— Frederick Douglass

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

— Frederick Douglass

104. “American labor rights activist, on activities of the National Farm Workers Association Human law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but human practice may.”

— Frederick Douglass

105. “The ballot is the only safety.”

— Frederick Douglass

106. “You have to take power. No one gives it.”

— Frederick Douglass

107. “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.”

— Frederick Douglass

108. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

— Frederick Douglass

109. “To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”

— Frederick Douglass

110. “The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance and are slowest in getting general acceptance.”

— Frederick Douglass

111. “The man who is right is a majority. He who has God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe.”

— Frederick Douglass

112. “The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers.”

— Frederick Douglass

113. “The silver trump of freedom roused in my soul eternal wakefulness.”

— Frederick Douglass

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

— Frederick Douglass

115. “Poverty, ignorance and degradation are the combined evils, these constitute the social disease of the free colored people of the US.”

— Frederick Douglass

116. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

117. “Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.”

— Frederick Douglass

118. “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

— Frederick Douglass

119. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

120. “It is the mission of the printer to diffuse light and knowledge by a judicious intermingling of black with white.”

— Frederick Douglass

121. “I was, for weeks, a poor, broken-hearted mourner, traveling through the darkness and misery of doubts and fears. I finally found that change of heart which comes by “casting all one’s care” upon God, and by having faith in Jesus Christ, as the Redeemer, Friend, and Savior of those who diligently seek Him. After.”

— Frederick Douglass

122. “It’s a poor rule that won’t work both ways.”

— Frederick Douglass

123. “What upon Earth is the matter with the American people? Do they really covet the world’s ridicule as well as their own social and political ruin?”

— Frederick Douglass

124. “Men who live by robbing their fellow men of their labor and liberty have forfeited their right to know anything of the thoughts, feelings, or purposes of those whom they rob and plunder. They have by the single act of slaveholding voluntarily placed themselves beyond the laws of justice and honor, and have become only fitted for companionship with thieves and pirates – the common enemies of God and of all mankind.”

— Frederick Douglass

125. “If I have advocated the cause of the Negro, it is not because I am a Negro, but because I am a man.”

— Frederick Douglass

126. “Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of a more horrible state of society?”

— Frederick Douglass

127. “The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved. When.”

— Frederick Douglass

128. “If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.”

— Frederick Douglass

129. “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?”

— Frederick Douglass

130. “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. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace.”

— Frederick Douglass

131. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

132. “Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it.”

— Frederick Douglass

133. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

134. “I felt some relief in contemplating the resting places of the dead, where there was an end to all distinctions between rich and poor, white and colored, high and low.”

— Frederick Douglass

135. “The American people are not remarkable for moderation. They despise halfness. They will go with him who goes farthest and stay with him who stays longest. What the country thinks of half-men and half-measures is seen by the last election. We repudiate all such men and all such measures.”

— Frederick Douglass

136. “Going to live at Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity.”

— Frederick Douglass

137. “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.”

— Frederick Douglass

138. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

139. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

140. “Abolition of slavery had been the deepest desire and the great labor of my life.”

— Frederick Douglass

141. “Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.”

— Frederick Douglass

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

— Frederick Douglass

143. “Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic.”

— Frederick Douglass

144. “Our community belongs to us and whether it is mean or majestic, whether arrayed in glory or covered in shame, we cannot but share its character and destiny.”

— Frederick Douglass

145. “To enslave men, successfully and safely, it is necessary to have their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived. A certain degree of attainable good must be kept before them.”

— Frederick Douglass

146. “For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.”

— Frederick Douglass

147. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

148. “A war undertaken and brazenly carried for the perpetual enslavement of the colored men, calls logically and loudly for the colored men to help suppress it.”

— Frederick Douglass

149. “I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, – a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, – a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, – and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection.”

— Frederick Douglass

150. “We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil – she, as mistress, I, as slave.”

— Frederick Douglass