Frederick Douglass

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean …

not to my admitted Anglo-Saxon paternity, but to the native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother—a woman, who belonged to a race whose mental endowments it is, at present, fashionable to hold in disparagement and …

I am quite willing, and even happy, to attribute any love of letters I possess

I say nothing of father, for he is shrouded in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate. Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families. Slavery has no use for either fathers or families, and its laws do not recognize …

You cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free.

The lonely billows of the Atlantic, where every breeze speaks of courage and liberty.

The man who prays in secret is far more likely to be sincere than he who loves to pray standing in the street, or in the great congregation.

The gnawings of hunger conquers by degrees, till all that a man has he would give in exchange for a single crust of bread.

Where there is seeming contentment with slavery, there is certain treachery to freedom.

Liberty I will have, or die in the attempt to gain it.

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.

For 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. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the …

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.

I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave's point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and …

This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

The days of Black Power are numbered. Its course, indeed is onward. But with the swiftness of an arrow, it rushes to the tomb. While crushing its millions, it is also crushing itself. The sword of Retribution, suspended by a single hair, …

We shall neither die out, nor be driven out; but shall go with this people, either as a testimony against them, or as an evidence in their favor throughout their generations.

We can be remodified, changed, assimilated, but never extinguished.

We deem it a settled point that the destiny of the colored man is bound up with that of the white people of this country. … We are here, and here we are likely to be.

In one point of view, we, the abolitionists and colored people, should meet [[w:Dred_Scott_decision|[the Dred Scott] decision]], unlooked for and monstrous as it appears, in a cheerful spirit. This very attempt to blot out forever the …

I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong.

The ground which a colored man occupies in this country is, every inch of it, sternly disputed.

Old as the everlasting hills; immovable as the throne of God; and certain as the purposes of eternal power, against all hinderances, and against all delays, and despite all the mutations of human instrumentalities, it is the faith of my …