Frederick Douglass: “They are heart songs, and the finest feelings of human nature are expressed in them.”

I believed I should get enough to eat at Covey’s, even if I suffered in other respects, and this to a hungry man is not a prospect to be regarded with indifference.

The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his mother.

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.

If I have had kicks, I have also had kindness.