Home > Work > Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom QUOTES

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom QUOTES

1 " But what man has made, man can un-make. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

2 " It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not . . . either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

3 " There is not beneath the sky an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted my mother who bore me into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

4 " He [Lincoln] was preeminently the white man’s president,” Douglass continued in his forceful baritone, “entirely devoted to the welfare of the white man. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of the country.”12 "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

5 " My poor mother,” Douglass wrote, “like many other slave women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!”21 "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

6 " Everybody in the south,” wrote Douglass, “wants the privilege of whipping somebody else. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

7 " Then he defined patriotism: “The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy who, under the specious . . . garb of patriotism seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

8 " it caused one of Douglass’s most challenging psychic dilemmas. He repeatedly faced the question of how uncompromising radicalism could mix with a learned pragmatism to try to influence real power, to determine how to condemn the princes and their laws but also influence and eventually join them. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

9 " Douglass told white northern voters that 'The blood of the slave is on your garments. You have said that slavery is better than freedom. That war is better than peace. And that cruelty is better than humanity. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

10 " Our government may at some time be in the hands of a bad man. When in the hands of a good man it is all well enough. . . . We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

11 " Grafton, Massachusetts, in early 1842, while working solo, Douglass was met by mob hostility in addition to an unwelcoming clergy. So he went to a hotel and borrowed a “dinner-bell, with which in hand I passed through the principal streets,” he recalled, “ringing the bell and crying out, ‘Notice! Frederick Douglass, recently a slave, will lecture on American Slavery, on Grafton Common, this evening at 7 o’clock.”13 "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

12 " I now saw, in my situation, several points of similarity with that of the oxen. They were property, so was I; they were to be broken, so was I. Covey was to break me, I was to break them; break and be broken—such is life. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

13 " immigrant poor, said Douglass, that “slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

14 " Slavery does away with fathers as it does away with families,” he wrote. “The order of civilization is reversed here. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

15 " People came in wagons and on horseback from many miles around to festival-like meetings from Ashtabula to Youngstown, Massillon to Leesburg, Salem to Munson. They had tapped into the grass roots of the free-labor militancy and Christian idealism of the Western Reserve. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

16 " By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

17 " The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy who, under the specious . . . garb of patriotism seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

18 " Douglass was the only black person attending the Seneca Falls convention, and it remained a matter of lifetime pride that he was among the thirty-two men and sixty-eight women who signed the “Declaration of Sentiments.” He would always be delighted to be called “a women’s rights man.” The motto on the masthead of the North Star, “Right is of No Color and No Sex,” had been no mere sentiment. 38 "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

19 " No African American speaker had ever faced this kind of captive audience, composed of all the leadership of the federal government in one place; and no such speaker would ever again until Barack Obama was inaugurated president in January 2009. Douglass, a master ironist about America, "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

20 " be included among those Americans the modern theologian Donald W. Shriver Jr. has called “honest patriots,” those who manifest an ironic-tragic love of country by learning, narrating, and working through its past of contradiction and evil, and not by evading it. "

― , Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom