Frederick Douglass Quotes

Abolitionists believe that, as all men are born free, so all who are now held as slaves in this country were born free, and that they are slaves now is the sin, not of those who introduced the race into this country, but of those, and those alone, who now hold them and have held them in slavery from their birth.

There will be no peace in this land until slavery is ended.

How many years can some people exist Before they're allowed to be free?

We shall never acquiesce in the enslavement of any people in order to purchase fancied gain for ourselves.

Oh Man, Man. How despicable in slavery, how great when fired with the love of freedom!

I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery.

To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.

They tell me: If you see a slave sleeping, do not wake him lest he be dreaming of freedom. I tell them: If you see a slave sleeping, wake him and explain to him freedom.

I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.

Virtue cannot dwell with slaves, nor reign O'er those who cower to take a tyrant's yoke.

God saw fit, for wise reasons to allow the people of Israel thus to make and possess slaves; but is this any license to us to enslave any of our fellow-men, to kill any of our fellow-men whom we please and are able to destroy, and take possession of their estates?

If you allow one single germ, one single seed of slavery to remain in the soil of America... that germ will spring up, that noxious weed will thrive, and again stifle the growth, wither the leaves, blast the flowers and poison the fair fruits of freedom.

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.

Slavery is a wrong to each individual enslaved; and not merely to the first of a series. Natural law, therefore, as much forbids the enslaving of the child, as if the wrong of enslaving the parent had never been perpetrated.

The world today is divided into the free and the enslaved.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

What to the Slave is the 4th of July.

Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.

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

Antislavery England continues to coquet with the Southern Slaveocracy.

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