Frederick Douglass

I have been greatly helped to bear up under unfriendly conditions, too, by a constitutional tendency to see the funny sides of things which has enabled me to laugh at follies that others would soberly resent.

If cast down, I have been exalted; and the latter experience has, after all, far exceeded the former.

Republics are said to be ungrateful, but ingratitude is not among the weaknesses of my people.

No people ever had a more lively sense of the value of faithful endeavor to serve their interests than they.

If intelligence is the only true and rational basis of government, it follows that that is the best government which draws its life and power from the largest sources of wisdom, energy, and goodness at its command.

We should all see the folly and madness of attempting to accomplish with a part what could only be done with the united strength of the whole.

War, slavery, injustice, and oppression, and the idea that might makes right, have been uppermost in all such governments; and the weak, for whose protection governments are ostensibly created, have had practically no rights which the…

The slayers of thousands have been exalted into heroes, and the worship of mere physical force has been considered glorious.

I believed that the exclusion of my race from participation in government was not only a wrong, but a great mistake, because it took from that race motives for high thought and endeavor, and degraded them in the eyes of the world around…

If from the cradle through life the outside world brands a class as unfit for this or that work, the character of the class will come to resemble and conform to the character described.

The light of no day in our national history has brought to the American people a more intense bereavement, a deeper sorrow, or a more profound sense of humiliation.

I had no proper idea of the wealth, refinement, enterprise, and high civilization of this section of the country.