Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, 1817-895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Likewise, Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave, from his birth until adolescence.

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These are among his most widely quoted observations.

o It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

o The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

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

o Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

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

o I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.

o The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

o The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.

o The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

o America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

o To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

o A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.

o On marrying Helen Pitts following his first wife Anna’s death after 40 years of marriage: “This proves I am impartial. My first wife was the color of my mother and the second, the color of my father.”

o I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

o One and God make a majority.

o I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.

o People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.

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

o No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

o The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery.

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

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

o A man’s character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him.

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Here is a direct link to his Wiki bio.

I urge you to check out his first personal account: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, with an introduction by Debra Newman and Tom Butker-Bowdon (Capstone Classics/A Wiley Imprint, 2021)