Frederick Douglass

I found that the success of a lecturer depends more upon the quality of his stock in store, than the amount.

I never rise to speak before an American audience without something of the feeling that my failure or success will bring blame or benefit to my whole race.

No man can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon the thought, feeling, and action of others; and who has himself no means in his own hands for guarding, protecting, defending, and maintaining that liberty.

The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only where there is power to make that law respected.

He was free from the individual master, but the slave of society.

He was in a word literally turned loose naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky.

The black man (unlike the Indian) loves civilization.

And now while I am not blind to the evils which have thus far attended the enfranchisement of the colored people, I hold that the evils from which we escaped, and the good we have derived from that act, amply vindicate its wisdom.

The demand for the ballot was such a vast advance upon the former objects proclaimed by the friends of the colored race, that it startled and struck men as preposterous and wholly inadmissible.

A man’s head will not long remain wrong, when his heart is right.

The very fact therefore that the old master-classes of the South felt that their interests were opposed to those of the freedmen, instead of being a reason against their enfranchisement, was the most powerful one in its favor.

It has been a part of my mission to expose the absurdity of this spirit of caste and in some measure help to emancipate men from its control.