Top 200 Frederick Douglass Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “Every one of us should be ashamed to be free while his brother is a slave.”

— Frederick Douglass

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

— Frederick Douglass

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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 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

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

— Frederick Douglass

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

— Frederick Douglass

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Frederick Douglass

163. “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

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

— Frederick Douglass

165. “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

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

— Frederick Douglass

167. “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

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

— Frederick Douglass

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

— Frederick Douglass

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Frederick Douglass

176. “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

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

— Frederick Douglass

178. “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

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

— Frederick Douglass

180. “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

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

— Frederick Douglass

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “As a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor.”

— Frederick Douglass

192. “Without any appeal to books, to laws, or to authorities of any kind, it was enough to accept God as a father, to regard slavery as a crime. I.”

— Frederick Douglass

193. “Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild. Like the fires of the prairie, once lighted, they are at the mercy of every wind, and must burn, till they have consumed all that is combustible within their remorseless grasp.”

— Frederick Douglass

194. “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

195. “The more men you make free, the more freedom is strengthened, and the more men you give an interest in the welfare and safety of the State, the greater is the security of the State.”

— Frederick Douglass

196. “My hopes were never brighter than now.”

— Frederick Douglass

197. “They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.”

— Frederick Douglass

198. “It is no disparagement to truth, that it can only prevail where reason prevails. War begins where reason ends. The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.”

— Frederick Douglass

199. “They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”

— Frederick Douglass

200. “From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen.”

— Frederick Douglass