Frederick Douglass Quotes

173 quotes in 2265 categories

• Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, . . . neither persons nor property will be safe.
• You are not judged by the height you have risen, but from the depth you have climbed.
• You degrade us and then ask why we are degraded. You shut our mouths and ask why we don't speak. You close your colleges and…
• The sunlight that has brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.
• For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and…
• They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.
• We are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men.
• If I have advocated the cause of the Negro, it is not because I am a Negro, but because I am a man.
• What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the…
• Allow us the dignity to fight for our own freedom
• ... and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty.
• Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document!
• What is possible for me is possible for you.
• I ask you...to adopt the principles proclaimed by yourselves, by your revolutionary fathers, and by the old bell in Independence Hall....
• The Federal Government was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government.
• Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered. It was purposely so framed as to give no claim,…
• The Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider it purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it…
• 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…
• Neither we, nor any other people, will ever be respected till we respect ourselves and we will never respect ourselves till we have the means…
• The mind does not take its complexion from the skin....

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