Frederick Douglass Quotes
Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free.
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 quotation is inscribed in the Madison Memorial Hall of the Library of Congress.
The societies that had regularly produced the great advances in the sciences were those that allowed its citizens much liberty—liberty of thought, expression, association, etc. Where religious dogma controlled thought and expression, great scientific achievements were far less probable or less productive. Imagine, what Galileo might have achieved if the Church had not curtailed his efforts. When Islamic society was open, the sciences flourished whereas they were stifled in Christian Europe, but once Islam closed and liberty was no more, Islamic science degenerated to its low point of the 21st century.
1st Baron Macaulay
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.
