Frederick Douglass

The conviction once thoroughly established in her mind, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other, I was most narrowly watched in all my movements.

In ceasing to instruct me, my mistress had to seek to justify herself to herself, and once consenting to take sides in such a debate, she was compelled to hold her position.

The first step in the wrong direction was the violence done to nature and to conscience, in arresting the benevolence that would have enlightened my young mind.

It must stand unharmed, or it does not stand at all.

If it be broken toward the slave on Sunday, it will be toward the master on Monday.

Once thoroughly injured, who is he who can repair the damage?

But slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these excellent qualities, and her home of its early happiness.

Her fervent piety and watchful uprightness made it impossible to see her without thinking and feeling “that woman is a Christian.” There was no sorrow nor suffering for which she had not a tear, and there was no innocent joy for which she…

Nature never intended that men and women should be either slaves or slaveholders, and nothing but rigid training long persisted in, can perfect the character of the one or the other.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.

His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.