30 Frederick Douglass Quotes on Failure, Grit & Growth

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

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

Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get.

I was broken in body, soul and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness.

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.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

The poor bondman lifts a smiling face above the surface of a sea of agonies, hoping on, hoping ever.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.

Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting and indefatigable work into which the whole heart is put.

There is no royal road to perfection.

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.

If there be one crevice through which a single drop may fall, it will certainly rust off the slave’s chains.

Old as the everlasting hills; immovable as the throne of God; and certain as the purposes of eternal power, against all hinderances, and against all delays, and despite all the mutations of human instrumentalities, it is the faith of my soul, that this anti-slavery cause will triumph.

I expose slavery in this country, because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death.

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

Man’s own greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.

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

Nature is herself a great worker and never tolerates, without certain rebuke, any contradiction to her wise example.

You may hurl a man so low, beneath the level of his kind, that he loses all just ideas of his natural position; but elevate him a little, and the clear conception of rights rises to life and power, and leads him onward.

Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and liberty.

Inaction is followed by stagnation. Stagnation is followed by pestilence and pestilence is followed by death.

Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.

Anything which looks to assisting the helpless, has my heart and has my hand.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man, without at least finding the other end of it about his own neck.

From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom.

To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason.

From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

We can work, and the grateful earth yields as readily and as bountifully to the touch of black industry as of white. We can work, and by this means we can retrieve all of our losses.