Frederick Douglass Patriot Quotations

Allow us the dignity to fight for our own freedom

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

The relation between the white and colored people of this country is the great, paramount, imperative, and all-commanding question for this age and nation to solve.

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.

Man's greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.

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

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.

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.

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.