Frederick Douglass Quotes

People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.

A man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.

Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.

Man’s greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

Truth is proper and beautiful in all times and in all places.

Without a struggle, there can be no progress.

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

A man’s character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him.

The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, ‘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.

A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Experience demonstrates that there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.

A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.