“I am not a propagandist, but a prophet. I do not say that what I say should come to pass, but what I think is likely to come to pass, and what is inevitable. While I would not be understood as advocating the desirability of such a result, I would not be understood as deprecating it”
1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)
Context: Of course this result will not be reached by any hurried or forced processes. It will not arise out of any theory of the wisdom of such blending of the two races. If it comes at all, it will come without shock or noise or violence of any kind, and only in the fullness of time, and it will be so adjusted to surrounding conditions as hardly to be observed. I would not be understood as advocating intermarriage between the two races. I am not a propagandist, but a prophet. I do not say that what I say should come to pass, but what I think is likely to come to pass, and what is inevitable. While I would not be understood as advocating the desirability of such a result, I would not be understood as deprecating it.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Frederick Douglass 274
American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman 1818–1895Related quotes
"Back Home!", first version (1926); translation from Patricia Blake (ed.) The Bedbug and Selected Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975) p. 36
“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”
Source: The Year of Magical Thinking
The Things They Carried (1990), On the Rainy River
Reported by Paul Scott in the Lewiston Daily Sun (27 September 1972) again as remarks at Duke University; http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FXwgAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7mcFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1010,3814989 reported elsewhere as a remark made at Michigan State University (22 November 1970) and cited to the Detroit Free Press but without a date, page or headline.
Rick Perlstein, in a 2005 London Review of Books article and in his 2008 book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Simon and Schuster, p517 http://books.google.com/books?id=dM_enWzoghoC&pg=PA517#v=onepage&q&f=false), accused Helms of inventing the quote: "They tapped their network of friendly media propagandists, like the future Senator Jesse Helms, then a TV editorialist, who supplied an invented quotation that still circulates as part of the Fonda cult’s liturgy." http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n22/rick-perlstein/operation-barbarella The COINTELPRO Papers (2002) documents a separate attempt to plant false quotes from Fonda in the press.
Disputed
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book IV, Ch. 23.
“I think as a kid I never really understood the magnitude of a hurricane and what it could do.”
St. Louis Post Dispatch 2005-08-31.
Attributed by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Life of Frederick the Great (1882), pg 48.
Repeated by Thomas Babington Macaulay in a review of "Frederick the Great and his Times. Edited, with an Introduction, by Thomas Campbell, Esq". Edinburgh Review, ISSN 1751-8482, 04/1842, Volume 75, Issue 151, p. 241-242, though it does not appear in the original work.
Knowles, Oxford Dictionary Of Quotations (5th Edition) (Oxford University Press, 1999)
Attributed