Top 280 Frederick Douglass Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

152. “Allow us the dignity to fight for our own freedom.”

— Frederick Douglass

153. “Mr. Lincoln was not only a great President, but a great man – too great to be small in anything. In his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color.”

— Frederick Douglass

154. “It was necessary to keep our religious masters at St. Michael’s unacquainted with the fact, that, instead of spending the Sabbath in wrestling, boxing, and drinking whisky, we were trying to learn how to read the will of God; for they had much rather see us engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings.”

— Frederick Douglass

155. “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected.”

— Frederick Douglass

156. “If a slave has a bad master, his ambition is to get a better; when he gets a better, he aspires to have the best; and when he gets the best, he aspires to be his own master.”

— Frederick Douglass

157. “I will give Mr. Freeland the credit of being the best master I ever had, till I became my own master.”

— Frederick Douglass

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

— Frederick Douglass

159. “They love the heathen on the other side of the globe. They can pray for him, pay money to have the Bible put into his hand, and missionaries to instruct him; while they despise and totally neglect the heathen at their own doors. Such is, very briefly, my view of the religion of this land;.”

— Frederick Douglass

160. “They seemed to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves. It was considered as being bad enough to be a slave; but to be a poor man’s slave was deemed a disgrace indeed!”

— Frederick Douglass

161. “Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.”

— Frederick Douglass

162. “Beat and cuff your slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog; but, feed and clothe him well, – work him moderately – surround him with physical comfort, – and dreams of freedom intrude. Give him a bad master, and he aspires to a good master; give him a good master, and he wishes to become his own master.”

— Frederick Douglass

163. “The relation between the white and colored people of this country is the great, paramount, imperative, and all-commanding question for this age and nation to solve.”

— Frederick Douglass

164. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

165. “Every one of us should be ashamed to be free while his brother is a slave.”

— Frederick Douglass

166. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

167. “Experience is a keen teacher;.”

— Frederick Douglass

168. “The Christianity of America is a Christianity, of whose votaries it may be as truly said, as it was of the ancient scribes and Pharisees, ‘They bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.”

— Frederick Douglass

169. “Yet people in general will say they like colored men as well as any other, but in their proper place.”

— Frederick Douglass

170. “I speak advisedly when I say this, – that killing a slave, or any colored person, in Talbot county, Maryland, is not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community.”

— Frederick Douglass

171. “This war, disguise it as they may, is virtually nothing more or less than perpetual slavery against universal freedoms.”

— Frederick Douglass

172. “Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these excellent qualities, and her home of its early happiness. Conscience cannot stand much violence.”

— Frederick Douglass

173. “I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.”

— Frederick Douglass

174. “Heaven’s blessing must attend all, and freedom must soon be given to the pining millions under a ruthless bondage.”

— Frederick Douglass

175. “A government, founded on impartial liberty, where all have a voice and a vote, irrespective of color or of sex – what is there to hinder such a government from standing firm.”

— Frederick Douglass

176. “Should a slave, when assaulted, but raise his hand in self defense, the white assaulting party is fully justified by southern, or Maryland, public opinion, in shooting the slave down.”

— Frederick Douglass

177. “I hear the mournful wail of millions!”

— Frederick Douglass

178. “Let us render the tyrant no aid.”

— Frederick Douglass

179. “Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.”

— Frederick Douglass

180. “In all my interviews with Mr. Lincoln I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race. He was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color...”

— Frederick Douglass

181. “There are at present many Coloured men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and labourers, but real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets.”

— Frederick Douglass

182. “A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar, – and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women, – before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.”

— Frederick Douglass

183. “I say, this picture sometimes appalled us, and made us rather bear those ills we had. Than fly to others, that we knew not of.”

— Frederick Douglass

184. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

185. “Fortune may crowd a man’s life with fortunate circumstances and happy opportunities, but they will, as we all know, avail him nothing unless he makes a wise and vigorous use of them.”

— Frederick Douglass

186. “There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”

— Frederick Douglass

187. “The Federal Government was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government.”

— Frederick Douglass

188. “The truth was, that he had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain; for he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him. The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger. He would occasionally say, he didn’t want to get hold of me again. “No,” thought I, “you need not; for you will come off worse than you did before.”

— Frederick Douglass

189. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

190. “A man’s troubles are always half disposed of when he finds endurance the only alternative.”

— Frederick Douglass

191. “I admit that the slave does sometimes sing, dance and appear to be merry. But what does this prove? It only proves to my mind, that though slavery is armed with a thousand stings, it is not able entirely to kill the elastic spirit of the bondman.”

— Frederick Douglass

192. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

193. “The arm of the Federal government is long, but it is far too short to protect the rights of individuals in the interior of distant States. They must have the power to protect themselves, or they will go unprotected, spite of all the laws the Federal government can put upon the national statute-book.”

— Frederick Douglass

194. “The name given me by my mother was, “Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey.” I, however, had dispensed with the two middle names long before I left Maryland so that I was generally known by the name of “Frederick Bailey.”

— Frederick Douglass

195. “Slavery blunts the edge of all our rebukes of tyranny abroad – the criticisms that we make upon other nations, only call forth ridicule, contempt, and scorn. In a word, we are made a reproach and a by-word to a mocking earth, and we must continue to be so made, so long as slavery continues to pollute our soil.”

— Frederick Douglass

196. “I escaped from slavery and became a leading abolitionist and speaker.”

— Frederick Douglass

197. “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hatethe corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.”

— Frederick Douglass

198. “I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God? Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught, or get clear, I’ll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever, I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; one hundred miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave.”

— Frederick Douglass

199. “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.”

— Frederick Douglass

200. “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 present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”

— Frederick Douglass