Frederick Douglass Quotes
A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.
Douglass, Frederick. "The Blessings of Liberty and Education." The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One--Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, edited by John W. Blassingame, vol. 5, Yale University Press, 1992, p. 623.
This was written when Islam was intellectually far more advanced than Christian Europe. This viewpoint was one of the reasons for their advanced civilization. It was held by many. It is still held by many Muslims, but for the fundamentalist of Islam today, ignorance of anything that is not in the Koran or other sayings of the Prophet is a virtue. Madrassas throughout the Islamic world teach only the Koran and religious law and nothing of mathematics, philosophy, science, history and never of other religions.
This means that a little learning both excites and stupefies us, while extensive learning – "drinking largely" of the spring, a mythological fountain sacred to the Muses – makes us serious and wise.
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Likewise, Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.
