Frederick Douglass Quotes

Guys in slavery sang praises to the Lord to deliver them from bondage.

If you love your children, if you love your country, if you love the God of love, clear your lands from slaves, burden not your children or country with them.

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom on those who are not free.

It is hard for the old slave holding spirit to die. But die it must.

As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.

Heaven's blessing must attend all, and freedom must soon be given to the pining millions under a ruthless bondage.

I will lead my people out of bondage, Lord.

My people couldn't have survived slavery without having hope that it would get better. And there's some songs from the 19th and 18th century that say [sings], "By and by, by and by, I will lay down, this heavy load." And I mean, so many songs that spoke of hope and understand it better by and by. Amazing songs. So that the slaves, just knowing that he, she, did not have the right legally to walk within one inch away from where the slave owner dictated, and yet the same person, wrote and sang with fervor, "If the lord wants somebody, here am I, send me." It's amazing.

I am the dream and the hope of the slave

Emancipation - what is meant by it? Simply that the slaves shall cease to be held as property and shall henceforth be held and treated as human beings. Simply, that we should take our feet from off their necks.

Moses freed the Jews. Lincoln freed the slaves. I freed the neurotics.

I sedulously refrained from doing anything that would incite slaves to run away from their masters.

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.

We are the first to honour the memories of those who perished through slavery, by declaring August 1 as Emancipation Day.

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

Nor was it only from the millions of slaves that chains had been removed; the whole nation had been in bondage; free speech had been suppressed.

Liberation is not deliverance.

A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.

Wherever it is resisted, slaver dies away and freedom grows.

In the Bible, God offered the Pharaoh freedom if he would just let the oppressed people free to go to the land of milk and honey. But the Pharaoh disobeyed, and he was destroyed.

Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.

Despite the great vision, it is only drop by drop that we squeeze the slave out of ourselves.

The existence of laws in the States where the newly emancipated negroes reside, which discriminated with gross injustice and hardship against them as a class, was the evil to be remedied …. The one pervading purpose, was protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.

I saw a passenger per the Underground Railroad yesterday; did he arrive safely? Notwithstanding that abomination of the nineteenth century — the Fugitive Slave Law — men still determine to be free. Notwithstanding all the darkness in which they keep the slaves, it seems that somehow light is dawning upon their minds

I am the law. I am over the slave owners that used to be over me. I am their mayor.