Frederick Douglass quotes

1818–1895 · Talbot County, MD

• If there be one crevice through which a single drop can fall, it will certainly rust off the slave's chain.

• I hated slavery, always, and the desire for freedom only needed a favorable breeze, to fan it into a blaze, at any moment.

• To be shut up entirely to the past and present, is abhorrent to the human mind; it is to the soul—whose life and happiness is unceasing progress—what the prison is to the body; a blight and mildew, a hell of horrors.

• The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past, troubled me, and I longed to have a future—a future with hope in it.

• The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

• The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your christianity as a lie.

• If there is no struggle there is no progress.

• Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

• …it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

• What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

• I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.

• You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

• From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.