Frederick Douglass Quotations

Everybody has asked the question . . . 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!

The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected.

I love the religion of Christianity - which cometh from above - which is a pure, peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of good fruits, and without hypocrisy.

Yet people in general will say they like colored men as well as any other, but in their proper place.

Poverty, ignorance and degradation are the combined evils, these constitute the social disease of the free colored people of the US.

Our destiny is largely in our hands.

We are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men.

I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.

The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think, and to SPEAK.

[...] endless action and reaction. Those beautifully rounded pebbles which you gather on the sand and which you hold in your hand and marvel at their exceeding smoothness, were chiseled into their varies and graceful forms by the ceaseless action of countless waves. Nature is herself a great worker and never tolerates, without certain rebuke, any contradiction to her wise example. Inaction is followed by stagnation. Stagnation is followed by pestilence and pestilence is followed by death.