Preface, § 2
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)
“If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation”
1860s, What the Black Man Wants (1865)
Context: We may be asked, I say, why we want it. I will tell you why we want it. We want it because it is our right, first of all. No class of men can, without insulting their own nature, be content with any deprivation of their rights. We want it again, as a means for educating our race. Men are so constituted that they derive their conviction of their own possibilities largely from the estimate formed of them by others. If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation. By depriving us of suffrage, you affirm our incapacity to form an intelligent judgment respecting public men and public measures; you declare before the world that we are unfit to exercise the elective franchise, and by this means lead us to undervalue ourselves, to put a low estimate upon ourselves, and to feel that we have no possibilities like other men. Again, I want the elective franchise, for one, as a colored man, because ours is a peculiar government, based upon a peculiar idea, and that idea is universal suffrage.
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Frederick Douglass 274
American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman 1818–1895Related quotes
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(1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer
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Joseph Stalin
(1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Statement in September 1939, as quoted in "Stalin's pact with Hitler" in WWII Behind Closed Doors at PBS http://www.pbs.org/behindcloseddoors/episode-1/ep1_stalins_pact.html
Contemporary witnesses
Hays translation
XI, 18
Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book XI