Frederick Douglass Quotes

I will unite with anyone to do good, but with no one to do harm.

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.

I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave.

Praying for freedom never did me any good til I started praying with my feet.

A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.

Truth is proper and beautiful in all times and in all places.

I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man’s political hopes and the ark of his safety.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.

One and God make a majority.

I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.