Quotes & Sayings About Frederick Douglass Life

I have often been asked how I felt when first I found myself on free soil. There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath and the "quick round of blood," I lived more in that one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe. — Frederick Douglass

In all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line. — Frederick Douglass

The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous. — Frederick Douglass

In life you don't get everything you pay for, but you must pay for everything you get. — Frederick Douglass

Nothing stands today where it stood yesterday. The choice which life presents is ever more between growth and decay, perfection and deterioration. There is no standing still, not can be. Advance or recede, occupy or give place, are the stern and inoperative alternatives, [the] self-existing and self-enforcing law of life, from the cradle to the grave.

He who despairs of progress despises the hope of the world, and shuts himself out from the chief significance of assistance -- and is dead while he lives. — Frederick Douglass

We [black people] don't respect our elders. Besides artists, we don't respect Frederick Douglass. We don't respect Martin Luther King. You look at every Martin Luther King Boulevard out here, and it's a crack block. That's not because of white people. That's because of black leadership. We just have that problem, and it's something that I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to conquer. — KRS-One

She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless left a slave - a slave for life - a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or her own destiny. — Frederick Douglass

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. — Frederick Douglass

Such are the limitations of the human mind, and so thoroughly engrossing are the cares of common life, that only the few among men can discern through the glitter and dazzle of present prosperity the dark outlines of approaching disasters, even though they may have come up to our very gates, and are already within striking distance. The yawning seam and corroded bolt conceal their defects from the mariner until the storm calls all hands to the pumps. Prophets, indeed, were abundant before the war; but who cares for prophets while their predictions remain unfulfilled, and the calamities of which they tell are masked behind a blinding blaze of national prosperity? — Frederick Douglass

I'm hopeful that at the end of my life, someone like Frederick Douglass would look at my life and say, 'Well done: you've proven yourself to be worthy of the legacy we left you.' — Cory Booker

A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar, - and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women, - before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life. — Frederick Douglass

In a composite Nation like ours, made up of almost every variety of the human family, there should be, as before the Law, no rich, no poor, no high, no low, no black, no white, but one country, one citizenship equal rights and a common destiny for all.
A government that cannot or does not protect the humblest citizen in his right to life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness, should be reformed or overthrown, without delay. — Frederick Douglass

Men talk much of a new birth. The fact is fundamental. But the mistake is in treating it as an incident which can only happen to a man once in a lifetime: whereas the whole journey of life is a succession of them. A new life springs up in the soul with the discovery of every new agency by which the soul is raised to a higher level of wisdom: goodness and joy. — Frederick Douglass

We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return. — Frederick Douglass

Once you learn to read, you will forever be free. — Frederick Douglass

Abolition of slavery had been the deepest desire and the great labor of my life — Frederick Douglass

Fortune may crowd a man's life with fortunate circumstances and happy opportunities, but they will, as we all know, avail him nothing unless he makes a wise and vigorous use of them. — Frederick Douglass

And in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty. — Frederick Douglass

The sunlight that has brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. — Frederick Douglass

Welcome, welcome joy, welcome sorrow, welcome pleasure, welcome pain. You are all the ingredients of life -- and with you all, life is an inestimable blessing. — Frederick Douglass

They are thought pictures -- the outstanding headlands of the meandering shores of life, and are points to steer by on the broad sea of thought and experience. They body forth in living forms and colors the ever varying lights and shadows of the soul. — Frederick Douglass