Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and this will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.

—Frederick Douglass

justice power wrong tyranny resistance demands submission

About Frederick Douglass

Portrait of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 14, 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He was "the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century".

More quotations from Frederick Douglass

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

—Frederick Douglass

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

—Frederick Douglass

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

—Frederick Douglass

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Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart, and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.

—Frederick Douglass

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

—Frederick Douglass

More quotations tagged with “submission”

Give all to love; obey thy heart.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Getting a living under capitalism… is so precarious, so uncertain, fraught with such pain and struggle that the wonder is not that so many people become vicious and criminal, but that so many remain in docile submission to such a tyrannous and debasing condition.

—Eugene V. Debs

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One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

—Helen Keller

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To say that there is a case for heroes is not to say that there is a case for hero worship. The surrender of decision, the unquestioning submission to leadership, the prostration of the average man before the Great Man—these are the diseases of heroism, and they are fatal to human dignity.… History amply shows that it is possible to have heroes without turning them into gods. And history shows, too, that when a society, in flight from hero worship, decides to do without great men at all, it gets into troubles of its own.

—Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

history society heroism dignity leadership surrender decision submission hero worship

History

23 Nov 2014 Added