I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.
Frederick Douglass: “I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.”
Editor's note · Context
From his autobiography, Douglass asserts the fundamental requirement for maintaining slavery: suppressing the intellect and critical thought of the enslaved.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
Let us then, wherever we are, whether at the North or at the South, resolutely struggle on in the belief that there is a better day coming, and that we by patience, industry, uprightness, and economy may hasten that better day.
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
The laws which determine the destinies of individuals and nations are impartial and eternal.
Some will be more successful than others, and poverty, in many cases, is the result of misfortune rather than of crime; but no race can afford to have all its members the victims of this misfortune, without being considered a worthless…