Frederick Douglass Quotes

If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you'll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.

We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

Man’s freedom is lacking if somebody else controls what he needs, for need may result in man’s enslavement of man..

All persons who dare to incite serfs and peasants to disobey their landlords shall be arrested and taken to the nearest government office, there to be punished forthwith as disturbers of the public tranquility, according to the laws and without leniency. And should it so happen that even after the publication of the present decree of Her Imperial Majesty any serfs and peasants should cease to give the proper obedience to their landlords ... and should make bold to submit unlawful petitions complaining of their landlords, and especially to petition Her Imperial Majesty personally, then both those who make the complaints and those who write up the petitions shall be punished by the knout and forthwith deported to Nerchinsk to penal servitude for life

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.

In every man's mind the good seeds of liberty are planted, and he who brings his fellow down so low, as to make him contented with a condition of slavery, commits the highest crime against God and man. Brethren, your oppressors aim to do this. They endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of your mind-when they have embittered the sweet waters of the light which shines from the word of God-then, and not till then has American slavery done its perfect work.

All people are enslaved by something.

The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

A slave-holder cannot hold a slave without putting himself or his deputy in the cage for holding the slave.

Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.

We are the slaves of slaves

There are a few men whom slavery holds fast, but there are many more who hold fast to slavery.

Sex, drugs, money, power etc. Just because you get to choose your master doesn't mean you aren't a slave.

Man puts manacles on his fellow-man; God never.

That slow poison [slavery] is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentlemen here is born a petty tyrant, practiced in acts of despotism and cruelty.

In part because they had no choice, right? If you were a slave, you did what the master said. And they said to worship: "You're going to worship with us."

It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are yourself the slave-driver.

Every man is a prisoner, and the greatest irony of all is to be the prisoner of another man.

This is what it means to be a slave; to be abused and bear it; compelled by violence to suffer wrong.

Servitude seizes on few, but many seize on her.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

Peoples will be as before, the sheep sent to the slaughterhouses or to the meadows as it pleases the shepherds.