Frederick Douglass Quotes

“But what man has made, man can un-make.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Our government may at some time be in the hands of a bad man. When in the hands of a good man it is all well enough. . . . We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not . . . either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Then he defined patriotism: “The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy who, under the specious . . . garb of patriotism seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Douglass was the only black person attending the Seneca Falls convention, and it remained a matter of lifetime pride that he was among the thirty-two men and sixty-eight women who signed the “Declaration of Sentiments.” He would always be delighted to be called “a women’s rights man.” The motto on the masthead of the North Star, “Right is of No Color and No Sex,” had been no mere sentiment. 38”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of 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 my mother who bore me into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Sorrow and desolation have their songs as well as joy and peace. Slaves sing more to make themselves happy than to express their happiness”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“I am no minister of malice,” he said, “I would not repel the repentant, but . . . may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that . . . bloody conflict. . . . I may say if this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy who, under the specious . . . garb of patriotism seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Douglass found little encouragement in the behavior of the Northern public during the secession crisis. The bulk of white Northerners had always viewed abolitionists with suspicion or contempt, and with the threat of disunion in the air, hostility to antislavery agitators rose to new levels of violence. By December 1860, Northern workingmen, along with merchants, shipowners, and cotton manufacturers, were deeply worried about the impact of potential disunion, while bankers and industrialists squirmed as the prices of stocks declined markedly.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Douglass told white northern voters that 'The blood of the slave is on your garments. You have said that slavery is better than freedom. That war is better than peace. And that cruelty is better than humanity.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“No African American speaker had ever faced this kind of captive audience, composed of all the leadership of the federal government in one place; and no such speaker would ever again until Barack Obama was inaugurated president in January 2009. Douglass, a master ironist about America,”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“I now saw, in my situation, several points of similarity with that of the oxen. They were property, so was I; they were to be broken, so was I. Covey was to break me, I was to break them; break and be broken—such is life.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Grafton, Massachusetts, in early 1842, while working solo, Douglass was met by mob hostility in addition to an unwelcoming clergy. So he went to a hotel and borrowed a “dinner-bell, with which in hand I passed through the principal streets,” he recalled, “ringing the bell and crying out, ‘Notice! Frederick Douglass, recently a slave, will lecture on American Slavery, on Grafton Common, this evening at 7 o’clock.”13”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“He [Lincoln] was preeminently the white man’s president,” Douglass continued in his forceful baritone, “entirely devoted to the welfare of the white man. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of the country.”12”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Everybody in the south,” wrote Douglass, “wants the privilege of whipping somebody else.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of indignation. In doing this I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is the lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“On September 2, the day the Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated George McClellan for president, news flashed across the country of the fall of Atlanta to General William Tecumseh Sherman after a long siege. Just as the Democrats met to declare the war a failure and crafted a platform that would lead to a negotiated Confederate independence of some kind, Sherman famously sent a telegram to Washington: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Confederates’ rising hopes plummeted, and many war-weary Northerners, represented by the famous New York diarist George Templeton Strong, saw victory now on the immediate horizon: “Glorious news this morning—Atlanta taken at last!!! It is . . . the greatest event of the war.”45 The Democrats’ peace platform put Lincoln’s apparent moderation in a different light; and Douglass had seen a devotion in the president’s heart and mind”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Remember that oppression hath the power to make even a wise man mad.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Douglass keenly grasped the plight of the white poor. In their “craftiness,” wrote Douglass, urban slaveholders and shipyard owners forged an “enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks,” forcing an embittered scramble for diminished wages, and rendering the white worker “as much a slave as the black slave himself.” Both were “plundered, and by the same plunderer.” The “white slave” and the “black slave” were both robbed, one by a single master, and the other by the entire slave system. The slaveholding class exploited the lethal tools of racism to convince the burgeoning immigrant poor, said Douglass, that “slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“The problem of the twenty-first century is still some agonizingly enduring combination of legacies bleeding forward from slavery and color lines. Freedom in its infinite meanings remains humanity’s most universal aspiration. Douglass’s life, and especially his words, may forever serve as our watch-warnings in our unending search for the beautiful, needful thing.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Well the nation may forget; it may shut its eyes to the past, but the colored people of this country are bound to keep fresh a memory of the past till justice shall be done them in the present.”39”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“It is not well to forget the past,” Douglass warned in a speech later in the 1880s. “Memory was given to man for some wise purpose. The past is . . . the mirror in which we may discern the dim outlines of the future and by which we may make them more symmetrical.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“When the Baptist meetinghouse in Ithaca threw the band of lecturers out of its evening session, they “adjourned into God’s house—the open air”—and held their impromptu meeting in the courthouse square. Some in the mob eventually climbed to the tower and rang the courthouse bell to break up the meeting. Sometimes, when they”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“When the influence of office or any other influence shall soften my hatred of tyranny and violence do not spare me; let fall upon me the lash of your keenest and most withering censure. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1879”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“Though I am not rich, I am not absolutely poor. . . . I am working now less for myself than for those around me. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, MAY 6, 1868”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“During times of peace, the sons bury their fathers, but in war it is the fathers who send their sons to the grave. —HERODOTUS, THE HISTORY”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
― David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom