"Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work."
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Frederick Douglass quotes (page 9 of 12)
232 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others."
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"Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither."
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"I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of increasing my contentment; it only increased my desire to be free, and set me thinking of plans to gain my freedom."
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"What to the Slave is the 4th of July."
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"If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others."
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"Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic."
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"Self-Made Men are the men who owe little or nothing to birth, relationship, friendly surroundings; to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education; who are what they are, without the aid of any favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results."
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"The District of Columbia is the one spot where there is no government for the people, of the people and by the people."
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"The Constitution of the United States knows no distinction between citizens on account of color. Neither does it know any difference between a citizen of a state and a citizen of the United States."
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"Who would be free themselves must strike the blow. Better even to die free than to live slaves."
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"In all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line."
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"Despite of it all, the Negro remains... cool, strong, imperturbable, and cheerful."
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"This war, disguise it as they may, is virtually nothing more or less than perpetual slavery against universal freedoms."
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"A man is worked on by what he works on."
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"The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing."
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"A man without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him."
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"A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnamity."
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"Having despised us, it is not strange that Americans should seek to render us despicable; having enslaved us, it is natural that they should strive to prove us unfit for freedom; having denounced us as indolent, it is not strange that they should cripple our enterprises."
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"I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave."
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