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Douglass Quotes Sources

Complete Citation References

All quotations from Frederick Douglass used in Douglass Portrait are documented below with their original sources. These citations provide historical context and proper attribution for each passage referenced in the composition.
QUOTE #3
"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845).
QUOTE #4
"I have often wished myself a beast or a bird — anything rather than a slave. I was wretched and gloomy beyond my power to describe. I was to thoughtful to be happy."
Source: Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, n.d.).
QUOTE #5
"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."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "Excerpt From: Speech- 'West India Emancipation,' Canandaigua, NY, Aug. 3," speech, venue unknown, 1857.
QUOTE #6
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both, but it must be a struggle."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "Excerpt From: Speech- 'West India Emancipation,' Canandaigua, NY, Aug. 3," speech, venue unknown, 1857.
QUOTE #7
"This is American slavery; no marriage—no education—the light of the gospel shut out from the dark mind of the bondman—and he forbidden by law to even learn to read."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "Excerpt From: Speech- 'West India Emancipation,' Canandaigua, NY, Aug. 3," speech, venue unknown, 1857.
QUOTE #10
"I heard my master say, if you teach that black man how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845).
QUOTE #11
"These words sank deep into my heart, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845).
QUOTE #12
"It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled with. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845).
QUOTE #18
"I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845).
QUOTE #19
"Slaveholders, are only a band of successful robbers, who, went into Africa stealing and reducing my people to slavery."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, n.d.).
QUOTE #20
"I had a right to liberty, against every obstacle even against the lives of our enslavers."
Source: Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, n.d.).
QUOTE #21
"No man can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon the thought, feeling and action of others, and who has himself no means in his own hands for guarding, protecting, defending and maintaining that liberty."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, n.d.).
QUOTE #22
"Everybody has asked the question…"
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What the Black Man Wants," Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Boston, Jan. 26, 1865.
QUOTE #23
"What shall we do with the Negro?"
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What the Black Man Wants," Boston, Jan. 26, 1865.
QUOTE #24
"I have had but one answer from the beginning."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What the Black Man Wants," Boston, Jan. 26, 1865.
QUOTE #25
"Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What the Black Man Wants," Boston, Jan. 26, 1865.
QUOTE #26
"Do nothing with us!"
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What the Black Man Wants," Boston, Jan. 26, 1865.
QUOTE #28
"In Ireland, I have seen no one degraded by me, or made to feel that he or she would be exalted by keeping me down."
Source: Frederick Douglass, in a letter from Belfast to American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass wrote in 1846.
QUOTE #29
"Amongst them all, I saw no one that seemed to be shocked or disturbed by my dark presence."
Source: Frederick Douglass, in a letter from Belfast to American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass wrote in 1846.
QUOTE #30
"The warm and generous co-operation contrasted so strongly with my long and bitter experience in the United States."
Source: Frederick Douglass, in a letter from Belfast to American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass wrote in 1846.
QUOTE #35
"I can truly say, I have spent some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country. I seem to have undergone a transformation. I live a new life."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, 1846).
QUOTE #36
"In thinking of America, I find myself admiring her blue sky, her grand old woods, her fertile fields, her beautiful rivers and lakes, and her star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked—my joy turned to mourning. I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slaveholding."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, 1846).
QUOTE #37
"As America will not allow her children to love her."
Source: Frederick Douglass, in a letter from Belfast to American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass wrote in 1846.
QUOTE #42
"The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "Douglass used this phrase in his address The Destiny of Colored Americans, which was delivered and later published in his newspaper, The North Star, on November 16," speech, venue unknown, 1849.
QUOTE #43
"The persecuted Native Americans, the first stewards of this soil, were driven out by the onward march of white settlement, and have been pressed from the open face of the country and the conscience of the nation."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "This a paraphrase from Douglass used in his address The Destiny of Colored Americans, which was delivered and later published in his newspaper, The North Star, on November 16," speech, venue unknown, 1849.
QUOTE #44
"Not so with the Black Man, for more than 200 years we have been identified with its soil under the bitterest circumstances of Slavery."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "Douglass used this phrase in his address The Destiny of Colored Americans, which was delivered and later published in his newspaper, The North Star, on November 16," speech, venue unknown, 1849.
QUOTE #45
"We can be remodified, changed, and assimilated."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "Douglass used this phrase in his address The Destiny of Colored Americans, which was delivered and later published in his newspaper, The North Star, on November 16," speech, venue unknown, 1849.
QUOTE #46
"But never extinguished..We Are Here!"
Source: Frederick Douglass, "Douglass used this phrase in his address The Destiny of Colored Americans, which was delivered and later published in his newspaper, The North Star, on November 16," speech, venue unknown, 1849.
QUOTE #47
"There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech, Rochester, NY, 1852.
QUOTE #53
"Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845).
QUOTE #54
"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ:"
Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845).
QUOTE #55
"I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845).
QUOTE #56
"I regarded them with contempt and scorn too deep for utterance, and my soul revolted at their mean and selfish conduct."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, n.d.).
QUOTE #57
"The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master."
Source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845).
QUOTE #62
"I believe no man, however gifted can voice the wrongs and present the demands of women with the skill and power of woman herself."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "Douglas, F. (). Frederick Douglass on woman suffrage: A speech before the International Council of Women, in Washington, D.C., April. Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/woman-suffrage/frederick-douglass-woman-suffrage-/," speech, venue unknown, 1888.
QUOTE #63
"Her right to be and to do is as full, complete and perfect as the right of any man on earth."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "Douglas, F. (). Frederick Douglass on woman suffrage: A speech before the International Council of Women, in Washington, D.C., April. Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/woman-suffrage/frederick-douglass-woman-suffrage-/," speech, venue unknown, 1888.
QUOTE #64
"I say of her, as I say of the colored people, 'Give her fair play, and hands off.'"
Source: Frederick Douglass, "Douglas, F. (). Frederick Douglass on woman suffrage: A speech before the International Council of Women, in Washington, D.C., April. Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/woman-suffrage/frederick-douglass-woman-suffrage-/," speech, venue unknown, 1888.
QUOTE #67
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?"
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech, Rochester, NY, 1852.
QUOTE #68
"I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year,"
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech, Rochester, NY, 1852.
QUOTE #69
"The gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech, Rochester, NY, 1852.
QUOTE #70
"This Fourth of July is yours, not mine."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech, Rochester, NY, 1852.
QUOTE #71
"You may rejoice, I must mourn."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech, Rochester, NY, 1852.
QUOTE #72
"Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation,"
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech, Rochester, NY, 1852.
QUOTE #73
"I do not despair of this country, drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech, Rochester, NY, 1852.
QUOTE #74
"I, therefore, leave off where I began,"
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech, Rochester, NY, 1852.
QUOTE #75
"With HOPE."
Source: Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech, Rochester, NY, 1852.