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 lightening. 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.

Frederick Douglass, ‘The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies’, Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, New Haven, 1985