Frederick Douglass: “The responsibility of success or failure lay heavily upon me.”

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.

It only abolished slavery where it did not exist, and left it intact where it did exist.

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.

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.