Tag Archives: Frederick Douglass

He Said That? 11/14/18

From Frederick Douglas (1818–1895) American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman:

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

He Said That? 2/27/16

From Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), born a slave in Maryland, American abolitionist, orator, author, editor, reformer, women’s rights advocate, and statesman during the American Civil War, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845):

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. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.