Men who live by robbing their fellowmen of their labor and liberty have forfeited their right to know anything of the thoughts, feelings, or purposes of those whom they rob and plunder.
From his autobiography, Douglass asserts that slaveholders, by their actions, forfeit any moral right to understand the minds of those they enslave.
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Notwithstanding the great and all-abounding darkness of our past, the clouds that still overhang us in the moral and social sky, the defects inherited from a bygone condition of servitude, it is the faith of my soul that this brighter and…
I will not listen, myself, and I would not have you listen to the nonsense, that no people can succeed in life among a people by whom they have been despised and oppressed.
The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.
A poverty-stricken class will be an ignorant and despised class, and no amount of sentiment can make it otherwise.