Frederick Douglass

"The nation cannot long endure thus divided."

"My nature was to work."

"I have a right to the fruits of my labor."

"Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned."

"The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future."

"I prided myself upon my ability to manage slaves, and to govern them well."

"Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberty of the world is put in peril."

"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."

"Knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom."

"I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."

"The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be."

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground."

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

"A man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity."

"I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary."

"The condition of the slave is simply made the condition of the laboring poor."

"No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck."

"A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation."

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress."

"Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it the first time they begin to read."

"Beat and cuff your slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog."

"Get the blacks now to vote, to become enfranchised, as it were, and they have got the power to protect themselves."

"I recognize the invisible hand that guides this nation's manifest destiny."

"What is possible for me is possible for you."

"I am a radical, and I am glad to be known as such."

"The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery."

"There is hope in the proverb; there is encouragement in the poem."

"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist."

"I have always regarded the day on which I was taken from my mother as the first and most horrible of all misfortunes."

"What to the slave is the Fourth of July? Your celebration is a sham."