Quotes About Douglass

To answer those who asked if Lincoln would reconsider, Douglass gave an emphatic no. "Abraham Lincoln will take no step backward," he insisted. "If he has taught us to confide in nothing else, he has taught us to confide in his word.

I really do not like having media moderators. Lincoln and Douglass didn't have moderators. Let the candidates ask one another questions.

Douglass told white northern voters that 'The blood of the slave is on your garments. You have said that slavery is better than freedom. That war is better than peace. And that cruelty is better than humanity.

No African American speaker had ever faced this kind of captive audience, composed of all the leadership of the federal government in one place; and no such speaker would ever again until Barack Obama was inaugurated president in January 2009. Douglass, a master ironist about America

I went to elementary school in Ottawa, and then to a private secondary school.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.

Indeed, scientific truth by consensus has had a uniformly bad history.

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

Douglass's hesitation was understandable. His own letters and speeches were consistently full of retribution and bloodshed, but Douglass never actually participated in any such activities.

My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best.

As a physicist, I can state that none of the 18 physicists who signed the Statement works in this field; nor to my knowledge has ever published a paper on this subject.

it caused one of Douglass's most challenging psychic dilemmas. He repeatedly faced the question of how uncompromising radicalism could mix with a learned pragmatism to try to influence real power, to determine how to condemn the princes and their laws but also influence and eventually join them.

We can only guess at the thrill in Douglass's heart, knowing that the cause he had so long pleaded—a sanctioned war to destroy slavery and potentially to reinvent the American republic around the principle of racial equality—might now come to fruition.

As a final objection to Blair's entreaty, Douglass once again addressed the pernicious effects of colonization, which he saw as proslavery theory in disguise. Douglass insisted that slavery, racism, and future black equality be discussed as a single question, to be settled on American soil within American institutions.

The problem of the twenty-first century is still some agonizingly enduring combination of legacies bleeding forward from slavery and color lines. Freedom in its infinite meanings remains humanity's most universal aspiration. Douglass's life, and especially his words, may forever serve as our watch-warnings in our unending search for the beautiful, needful thing.

The Proclamation, even with its limitations (freeing slaves only in the Confederate states or in occupied areas), brought about a world-historical moment, "a complete revolution in the position of a nation." The republic was undergoing a second founding, and Douglass felt more than ready to be one of its fathers. An amazing change was under way, argued Douglass, not only for blacks and for the nation, but for "justice throughout the world.

In the 1880s, though, Douglass's fame still had to be couched in the racialized claim that he represented "the one, and apparently only one, exception to the general laziness and ignorance of the black population in the midst of which he was born.

in successive elections, Douglass made the memory of emancipation his major preoccupation, pushing his readers to never forget what the war had been about. In the fall of 1870 he warned that Americans were by habit "destitute of political memory.

An embittered Douglass declared the United States a tyranny, a nation of corrupted memory, abandoning its victories in favor of power, greed, racial fear, and pride.

Douglass wrote, "Not a Negro Problem, not a race problem, but a national problem; whether the American people will ultimately administer equal justice to all the varieties of the human race in this Republic.

Whenever Douglass made arguments against slavery from the natural-rights tradition

Americans, Douglass believed, instinctively and culturally watched history and preferred not to act in it.

Notice that the GOP program—articulated by Douglass and affirmed by black leaders—is none other than the color-blind ideal outlined in Martin Luther King's famous "dream." King envisioned a society in which we are judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. This is substantially what Douglass and other black Republicans called for, more than a century earlier.

Douglass had to dismantle what Americans have always treasured most: their innocence, and the sense that their history was so exceptional that they had managed to avoid the problems other nations faced.