"Without a struggle, there can be no progress."
Here are some quotes that well illustrate what a brilliant man, and how far ahead of his time, Frederick Douglass was.
"A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people."
-Address, Washington, D.C., 1889
"The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery."
-The North Star
"The destiny of the colored American is the destiny of America."
-Speech, Boston, 1862
"The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous."
-Speech, Washington, D.C., 1885
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
-Address, Washington, D.C. 1889
"If a slave has a bad master, his ambition is to get a better; when he gets better, he aspires to have the best; and when he gets the best, he aspires to be his own master."
-An Appeal to the British People
"America cannot always sit as a queen in peace and repose. Prouder and stronger governments than hers have been shattered by the bolts of a just God. "
-The North Star
"Oppression makes a wise man mad."
-Address, Rochester, 1852
"Woman knows and feels her wrongs as a man cannot know and feel them, and she knows as well as he can know, what measures are needed to redress them."
-Woman's Journal, 1888
". . . the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines . . . have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity. For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! In preference to the gospel as preached by those Divines!"
-Speech, Rochester, July 4, 1852
"The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witness of your devotion to freedom and of your own heroism."
-Letter to Harriet Tubman, 1868
"The simplest truths often meet with the sternest resistance and are slowest in getting general acceptance."
-"The Woman Suffrage Movement," Essay, 1870
