Quotes from Frederick Douglass

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

I expose slavery in this country, because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

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 has and it never will.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.

I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class

He who would be free must strike the first blow.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppos

I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and the ark of his safety.

I expose slavery in this country, because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death.

You profess to believe that "of one blood God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth"—and hath commanded all men, everywhere, to love one another—yet you notoriously hate (and glory in your hatred!) all men whose skins are not colored like your own!

There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution.

When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

The ground which a colored man occupies in this country is, every inch of it, sternly disputed.

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.

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.

The relation subsisting 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.

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

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.

In all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line.

Despite of it all, the Negro remains… cool, strong, imperturbable, and cheerful.