Frederick Douglass

When he drives her from his presence without redress, or the hope of redress, he acts, generally, from motives of policy, rather than from a hardened nature, or from innate brutality.

In law, the slave has no wife, no children, no country, and no home.

I shall make use of you as a means of exposing the character of the American church and clergy—and as a means of bringing this guilty nation, with yourself, to repentance.

The man had obtained complete control over me; and if he had commanded me to do any possible thing, I should, in my then state of mind, have endeavored to comply.

I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery—as a means of concentrating public attention on the system, and deepening the horror of trafficking in the souls and bodies of men.

Oh! the vocabulary of the damned would not afford a word sufficiently infernal to express your idea of my God-provoking wickedness.

The overwork, and the brutal chastisements of which I was the victim, combined with that ever-gnawing and soul-devouring thought—“I am a slave—a slave for life—a slave with no rational ground to hope for freedom”—rendered me a living…

Howsoever the slaveholder may allow himself to act toward his slave, and, whatever cruelty he may deem it wise, for example’s sake, or for the gratification of his humor, to inflict, he cannot, in the absence of all provocation, look with…

It is an outrage upon the soul, a war upon the immortal spirit, and one for which you must give account at the bar of our common Father and Creator.

You have kept them in utter ignorance, and have therefore robbed them of the sweet enjoyments of writing or receiving letters from absent friends and relatives.

I was completely wrecked, changed and bewildered; goaded almost to madness at one time, and at another reconciling myself to my wretched condition.

Oh! she was to me a mother and a father, so far as hard toil for my comfort could make her such.