My Bondage and My Freedom Quotes

“The marriage institution cannot exist among slaves, and one sixth of the population of democratic America is denied it's privileges by the law of the land. What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of it's humanity, boasting of its Christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnamity.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into competition with a class of laborers who worked without wages. The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves as men--not against them as slaves.”
― Frederick Douglass , My Bondage and My Freedom

“I had a wholesome dread of the consequences of running in debt.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“Slavery blunts the edge of all our rebukes of tyranny abroad - the criticisms that we make upon other nations, only call forth ridicule, contempt, and scorn. In a word, we are made a reproach and a by-word to a mocking earth, and we must continue to be so made, so long as slavery continues to pollute our soil.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“When I went into their family, it was the abode of happiness and contentment. The mistress of the house was a model of affection and tenderness. Her fervent piety and watchful uprightness made it impossible to see her without thinking and feeling—"that woman is a Christian.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“To enslave men, successfully and safely, it is necessary to have their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived. A certain degree of attainable good must be kept before them.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“Behind the tall-backed and elaborately wrought chairs, stand the servants, men and maidens—fifteen in number—discriminately selected, not only with a view to their industry and faithfulness, but with special regard to their personal appearance, their graceful agility and captivating address. Some of these are armed with fans, and are fanning reviving breezes toward the over-heated brows of the alabaster ladies; others watch with eager eye, and with fawn-like step anticipate and supply wants before they are sufficiently formed to be announced by word or sign.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“I had reached the point, at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a Freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form,”
― Frederick Douglass, My bondaje and my freedom

“We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil—she, as mistress, I, as slave.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“Without any appeal to books, to laws, or to authorities of any kind, it was enough to accept God as a father, to regard slavery as a crime. I”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“The better you treat a slave, the more you destroy his value as a slave, and enhance the probability of his eluding the grasp of the slaveholder; the more kindly you treat him, the more wretched you make him, while you keep him in the condition of a slave.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“Driven intosemi-exile by civil and barbarous laws, and by a system which cannot be thought of without a shudder, I was fullyjustified in turning, if possible, the tide of the moral universeagainst the heaven-daring outrage.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“I had deep satisfaction in the thought, that the reality of shareholders was not concealed from the eyes of the world, and that I was not alone in aborting the cruelty and brutality of slavery.”
― Frederick Douglas, My Bondage and My Freedom

“I was, for weeks, a poor, broken-hearted mourner, traveling through the darkness and misery of doubts and fears. I finally found that change of heart which comes by “casting all one’s care” upon God, and by having faith in Jesus Christ, as the Redeemer, Friend, and Savior of those who diligently seek Him. After”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“There is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these excellent qualities, and her home of its early happiness. Conscience cannot stand much violence.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“Should a slave, when assaulted, but raise his hand in self defense, the white assaulting party is fully justified by southern, or Maryland, public opinion, in shooting the slave down.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“Your faculties remained yours, and mine became useful to their rightful owner.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“If a slave has a bad master, his ambition is to get a better; when he gets a better, he aspires to have the best; and when he gets the best, he aspires to be his own master.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“The table groans under the heavy and blood-bought luxuries gathered with painstaking care, at home and abroad. Fields, forests, rivers and seas, are made tributary here. Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“The northern people have been long connected with slavery; they have been linked to a decaying corpse; which has destroyed the moral health. The union of the government; the union of the north and the south, in the political parties; the union in the religious organizations of the land, have all served to deaden the moral sense of the northern people, and to impregnate them with sentiments and ideas forever in conflict with what as a nation we call genius of American institutions.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“I admit that the slave does sometimes sing, dance and appear to be merry. But what does this prove? It only proves to my mind, that though slavery is armed with a thousand stings, it is not able entirely to kill the elastic spirit of the bondman.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“I became convinced that there was no necessity for dissolving the "union between the northern and the southern states"; that to seek this dissolution was no part of my duty as an abolitionist; that to abstain from voting, was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery; and that the constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, it is, in its letter and spirit, an anti-slavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence, as the supreme law of the land.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“The reading of these speeches added much to my limited stock of language, and enabled me to give tongue to many interesting thoughts, which had frequently flashed through my soul, and died away for want of utterance.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild. Like the fires of the prairie, once lighted, they are at the mercy of every wind, and must burn, till they have consumed all that is combustible within their remorseless grasp.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. . . .Make a man a slave, and youmrob him of of moral responsibility. Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom ..

“Beware of a Yankee when he is feeding,”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“The practice of separating children from their mother, and hiring the latter out at distances too great to admit of their meeting, except at long intervals, is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system. But it is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which, always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

“assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south—as I have observed it and proved it—is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes; the justifier of the most appalling barbarity; a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds; and a secure shelter, under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal abominations fester and flourish.”
― Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom