Frederick Douglass

The more I observed and learned the more my confidence diminished.

I am inclined, on the whole, to believe it a tolerably good nature, yet instances do occur which oblige me to concede that men can and do act from mere personal and selfish motives.

True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.

The way of transgression is a bottomless pit, one step in that direction invites the next, and the end is never reached; and it is the same with the path of righteous obedience.

It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave master.

Those masters secured their ascendency over both the poor whites and blacks by putting enmity between them.

Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.

Peace between races is not to be secured by degrading one race and exalting another, by giving power to one race and withholding it from another, but by maintaining a state of equal justice between all classes.

The men who framed it, and those who adopted it, framed and adopted it for the people, and the whole people--colored men being at that time legal voters in most of the States.

They, dear fellows, found it much more agreeable to talk of the principles of liberty as glittering generalities, than to reduce those principles to practice.

No word of retaliation when a black man is slain by a rebel in cold blood.

I have always felt, too, that I had on my side all the invisible forces of the moral government of the universe.