118 quotes
We deem it a settled point that the destiny of the colored man is bound up with that of the white people of this country. … We are here, and here we are likely to be.
They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me…
Detraction paves the way for the very perfections which it doubts and denies.
Self-Made Men (1872)
The principle must rest upon its own proper basis.
Plea for Free Speech in Boston (1880)
I hold that women, as well as men, have the right to vote, and my heart and my voice go with the movement to extend suffrage to woman.
What the Black Man Wants (1865)
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Every man is the original, rightful, and absolute owner of his own body; or in other words, every man is himself, is his self, if you please, and belongs to himself, and can only part from his self ownership, by the commission of a crime.
Slavery is essentially barbarous in its character. It, above all things else, dreads the presence of an advanced civilization. It flourishes best where it meets no reproving frowns, and hears no condemning voices.
[T]he Constitution of the United States knows no distinction between citizens on account of color.
Reconstruction (1866)
I hope and trust all will come out right in the end, but the immediate future looks dark, and troubled. I cannot shut my eyes to the ugly facts before me.
Lessons of the Hour (1894)
Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost, but it never failed…we were at times stunned, grieved, and greatly bewildered; but our hearts believed while they ached and bled.
It is not uncommon to charge slaves with great treachery toward each other, but I must say I never loved, esteemed, or confided in men more than I did in these. They were as true as steel, and no band of brothers could be more loving.
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)
Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters "U.S.", let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.
Should the Negro Enlist in the Union Army? (1863)
He treated me as a man... He did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins.
About Abraham Lincoln (1864)
I believe in individuality, but individuals are, to the mass, like waves to the ocean. The highest order of genius is as dependent as is the lowest.
Self-Made Men (1872)
When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other may stop.
Lessons of the Hour (1894)
A man's right to speak does not depend upon where he was born or upon his color. The simple quality of manhood is the solid basis of the right-and there let it rest forever.
Plea for Free Speech in Boston (1880)
A simple leaden bullet and a few grains of powder are sufficient in the shortest limit of time to blast and ruin all that is precious in human existence, not alone of the murdered, but of the murderer.
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
West India Emancipation (1857)
'Inferiority' is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved.