Frederick Douglass

This arrangement admits of the greatest license to brutal slaveholders, and their profligate sons, brothers, relations and friends, and gives to the pleasure of sin, the additional attraction of profit.

While America is printing tracts and bibles; sending missionaries abroad to convert the heathen; expending her money in various ways for the promotion of the gospel in foreign lands—the slave not only lies forgotten, uncared for, but is…

I have to inform you that the religion of the southern states, at this time, is the great supporter, the great sanctioner of the bloody atrocities to which I have referred.

The whole community—with but a single exception, among the whites—frowned upon everything like imparting instruction either to slaves or to free colored persons.

No law whatever will bring the guilty man to justice for the crime.

I think no better exposure of slavery can be made than is made by the laws of the states in which slavery exists.

They seemed almost as unconcerned about our getting to heaven, as they were about our getting out of slavery.

Indeed, I now have reason to think he was not; nevertheless, the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that, by the laws of slavery, children, in all cases, are reduced to the condition of their mothers.

Are not such deeds condemned by the law and denounced by public opinion?

Can it be possible that such things as these exist in the United States?

The natural wickedness of his heart had not been removed, but only reinforced, by the profession of religion.

She chose death, rather than to go back into the hands of those christian slaveholders from whom she had escaped.