Frederick Douglass

He knows very well whatsoever he would have done unto himself, but is quite in doubt as to having the same thing done unto others.

In his own cause he can beat a Boston lawyer, but he is dumb when asked to plead the cause of others.

He only blunders when asked to lose sight of himself.

Were slaveholders to listen to complaints of this sort against the overseers, the luxury of owning large numbers of slaves, would be impossible.

You have only to keep out of sight the manner of applying your principles, to get them endorsed every time.

If there be but one such man in the land, no matter what becomes of abolition societies and parties, there will be an anti-slavery cause, and an anti-slavery movement.

It is to snatch from the bosom of nature the latent facts of each individual man’s experience, and with steady hand to hold them up fresh and glowing, enforcing, with all his power, their acknowledgment and practical adoption.

His great work on earth is to exemplify, and to illustrate, and to ingraft those principles upon the living and practical understandings of all men within the reach of his influence.

Ignorance is a high virtue in a human chattel; and as the master studies to keep the slave ignorant, the slave is cunning enough to make the master think he succeeds.

The man who has thoroughly embraced the principles of justice, love, and liberty, like the true preacher of Christianity, is less anxious to reproach the world of its sins, than to win it to repentance.

If the anti-slavery movement shall fail now, it will not be from outward opposition, but from inward decay.

One flash from the heart-supplied intellect of Harriet Beecher Stowe could light a million camp fires in front of the embattled host of slavery, which not all the waters of the Mississippi, mingled as they are with blood, could extinguish.