Frederick Douglass

I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and the ark of his safety.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.

When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.

I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave.

Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.

Man's greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, '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.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

That which is inhuman cannot be divine.

A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.

There is not a man beneath the canopy of Heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.

What to the Slave is the 4th of July.

The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.