Frederick Douglass Quotes

We have no right to believe that freedom can be won without struggle.

If you only make fights that you're going to win, there would be no women's vote in America, there would be no civil rights laws in the country.

Every generation must re-win its own freedoms.

I think the greatest legacy of the 1960s was the general feeling that not only can you fight the powers that be, but you can win.

I don't think there's any perfect way to protest.

As I grew older and got into the late teens and early 20s, I wanted to be a voice of the people. You know, getting locked up all the time and going through so much oppression and seeing it all around myself, I wanted to be a voice for it.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress....This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that. That's the reason he's mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed I mean, what he was advocating for was not necessarily the right answer, but he was fighting against some great injustice, and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people's lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter - but beautiful - struggle for a new world.

Democracy is not what we hate the most and what we fear the most. We need to stand up.

Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.

I'm not sure I'm trying to communicate a message. I'm just trying to be part of the movement away from the unacceptable present.

There is a weapon we can fight with. That is the weapon of political action.

I can't let time move on without fighting tooth and nail and hopefully being a part of a revolution that is positive.

There are good reasons for being in jail - for protesting.

There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

Political and social change is always a stagger-step process. One step forward, two steps back. They want you to give up.

A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat.

The world you live in is not a given; much of what is best in it has been built through the struggles of passionate activists over the last centuries. They won us many freedoms and protected many beauties. Count those gifts among your growing heap.

So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

Dissidents can't be dissidents forever; we are dissidents because we don't want to be dissidents.

When I was engaged in the struggle for my country, I was very young. My horizons were open.

Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.

When I wrote the song, The Way It Is, I wanted to move people to take a stand on civil rights in this country.