Born a slave in 1817, Frederick Douglass secretly learned to read and write. He escaped slavery in 1838 and went on to become an acclaimed orator, newspaper publisher, abolitionist, and advisor to presidents Lincoln and Grant.
“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.”
“There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong.”
“A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.”
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
“The soul that is within me no man can degrade.”
“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.”
“Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.”
“I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.”
“You are not judged on the height you have risen but on the depth from which you have climbed.”
“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.”
“Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they certainly pay for all they get.”
“They who study mankind with a whip in their hands will always go wrong.”
“The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance.”
“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.”
The droplets in a sneeze can travel 12 feet and remain in the air for as long as three hours.