Self-Emancipation Quotes

I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects that must be saved from a burning building.

Empowerment is a word that comes with liberty.

Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.

I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in the old cabin quarter, with the old folks, and my brothers and sisters. But to this solemn resolution I came; I was free, and they should be free also; I would make a home for them in the North, and the Lord helping me, I would bring them all there.

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap.

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

We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.

You may perhaps think me less for running away from slavery, but as to myself, I have but one apology to make for it, which is this: I have only to regret that I did not start at an earlier period. I might have been free long before I was.

Liberation is not deliverance.

If one awakens in men the idea of freedom, then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves…

The people are their own liberators.

We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of our oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.

'Liberation' is an interesting word because you can be liberated from external things and also from your internal dialogue.

You have to liberate yourself first from the prejudices of the world in which you live.

What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.

He who would be free must strike the first blow.

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

Pushing ahead with a self-emancipatory agenda is critical, but we must do so fully conscious of this broader context of our development efforts.

Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.

Growing up, I read all three of Frederick Douglass' autobiographies by the time I was 12.