Frederick Douglass: “In a circle so brilliant, it is no affectation of modesty to say I was for the most part a listener and a learner.”

No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.

Everywhere in the south the colored man is learning to read.

Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.

To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.