Frederick Douglass Quotes

Revolution is not a goal in itself.

Radicalism is a label that is always applied to people who are endeavoring to get freedom.

Fire in the lake: The image of revolution.

The meek are a hell of a long way from inheriting the earth.

Progressive, radical, or even revolutionary change has always come from below.

I intend to go up there and kick the system over, not try to change it.

You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.

Our objective is complete freedom, justice and equality by any means necessary.

I'm a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man's house on fire, you don't hear these little Negroes talking about 'our government is in trouble'. They say, 'The government is in trouble.'

Come forward, some great marshal, and organize equality in society, and your rod shall swallow up all the juggling old court gold-sticks

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies.

You can tell people of the need to struggle, but when the powerless start to see that they really can make a difference, nothing can quench the fire.

I used to dream militant dreams of taking over america to show these whitefolks how it should be done i used to dream radical dreams of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers of correct analysis i even used to think that i'd be the one to stop the riot and negotiate the peace then i awoke & dug that if i dreamed natural dreams of being a natural woman doing what a woman does when she's natural i would have a revolution.

Martin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don't know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday.

I am a revolutionary; my life is dedicated to freeing the people.

Labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.

You see Martin Luther King is dead and Huey Newton is not. And Malcolm X is dead and Bobby Seale is not. And Vernon Jordan was shot. The thing that revolutionaries, or even people who want to claim they're revolutionaries, often forget is that it doesn't make no difference what kind of wardrobe you wear, and if you speak up about Black people doing better you just risked your life.

What we're seeing in so many of the counterprotests. We're seeing America rise in a way that it did not in the '60s, which I think is powerful and symbolic to the rest of the world, that we reject the darkness and we embrace the light.

When we talked about Socrates, we saw how dangerous it could be to appeal to people's reason. With Jesus we see how dangerous it can be to demand unconditional forgiveness. Even in the world of today, we can see how mighty powers can come apart at the seams when confronted with simple demands for peace, love, food for the poor, and amnesty for the enemies of the state.

Legislators and revolutionaries who promise both equality and liberty are visionaries and charlatans.

An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence - such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action.

The voice of honest indignation is the voice of God.

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power.

We must fight to carry out his radical and bold vision for America.

Revolutions usually start with enthusiasm and end in tears.