Frederick Douglass on Authoritarians

For no particular reason, having nothing to do with our current political moment, and completely unrelated to the Democrats in Congress, here’s a quote from Frederick Douglass:

They prefer to whip those who are most easily whipped. The old doctrine that submission is the best cure for outrage and wrong does not hold good on the slave plantation. He is whipped oftenest who is whipped easiest, and that slave who has the courage to stand up for himself against the overseer, although he may have many hard stripes at the first, becomes in the end a freeman, even though he sustain the formal relation of a slave. “You can shoot me but you can’t whip me,” said a slave to Rigby Hopkins, and the result was that he was neither whipped nor shot. If the latter had been his fate, it would have been less deplorable than the living and lingering death to which cowardly and slavish souls are subjected.

— My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855