Frederick Douglass: “The natural wickedness of his heart had not been removed, but only reinforced, by the profession of religion.”

I looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my mother.

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

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.

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.