Frederick Douglass Quotes

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.

If we can get to the truth, we can change anything.

I think it's better to have ideas.

We are free to change the world and start something new in it.

If the people of Comic-Con ruled the world...then tomorrow would be invented every day.

If it come to prohibiting, there is aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.

Everything great that ever happened in this world happened first in somebody’s imagination.

This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.

To prevent inquiry is amongst the worst of evils.

Once upon a time freedom used to be life-now it's money. I guess the world really do change.

If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.

It is not so difficult a task as to plant new truths, as to root out old errors

As hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.

You can't shoot an idea.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free. Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls. Where words come out from the depth of truth, where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection. Where the clear stream of reason has not lost it's way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit. Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action. In to that heaven of freedom, my father, LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE!

For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better.

Time and progress are synonymous terms--nothing can stop either. Truth will prevail and that is why I know that my teachings will reach the masses and finally be adopted as universal.

All our thinking constitutes the new world, but all our thoughts are older and older.

Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.

Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch.

If you really want to change the world, you must first understand it adequately, or all you will do is reproduce in larger numbers your own ignorance.

Now is our time to change the world

A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.