Thursday, January 31, 2008

Power concedes nothing without a struggle

This is a good quote, attached to the signature line of an editor at the New York Law Journal that I was emailing with today.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate 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; or 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.

— Frederick Douglass, 1857


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