Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglasswas an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement from Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a...
ProfessionAutobiographer
Date of Birth14 February 1818
CityTalbot County, MD
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow. Better even to die free than to live slaves.
Heaven's blessing must attend all, and freedom must soon be given to the pining millions under a ruthless bondage.
I ask you...to adopt the principles proclaimed by yourselves, by your revolutionary fathers, and by the old bell in Independence Hall....
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.
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.
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
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.
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.
People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.