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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Frederick Douglass (c. 1817–95)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 443
AUTHOR: Frederick Douglass (c. 1817–95)
QUOTATION: If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
ATTRIBUTION: FREDERICK DOUGLASS, “West India Emancipation,” speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 4, 1857.—The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner, vol. 2, p. 437 (1950).
SUBJECTS: Dissent