Frederick Douglass

The balsam was not more healing to the wound in my head, than her kindness was healing to the wounds in my spirit, made by the unfeeling words of Aunt Katy.

He seemed to wish to assure them, that his tears over poor, lost and ruined sinners, and his pity for them, did not reach to the blacks who tilled his fields.

The back of his slave-woman will, in the judgment, be the swiftest witness against him.

In a family where there was so much that was harsh, cold and indifferent, the slightest word or look of kindness passed, with me, for its full value.

Religious slaveholders, like religious persecutors, are ever extreme in their malice and violence.

Exceptions there may be, but this is true of religious slaveholders, as a class.

Should a slave, when assaulted, but raise his hand in self defense, the white assaulting party is fully justified by southern, or Maryland, public opinion, in shooting the slave down.

I have found them, almost invariably, the vilest, meanest and basest of their class.

For all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst.

The usual pretext for killing a slave is, that the slave has offered resistance.

Were I again to be reduced to the condition of a slave, next to that calamity, I should regard the fact of being the slave of a religious slaveholder, the greatest that could befall me.

It is the sober, thinking slave who is dangerous, and needs the vigilance of his master, to keep him a slave.