Frederick Douglass: “Greatness does not come to any people on flowery beds of ease.”

Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.

No people to whom liberty is given, can hold it as firmly and wear it as grandly as those who wrench their liberty from the iron hand of the tyrant.

It is this, neither we, nor any other people, will ever be respected till we respect ourselves, and we will never respect ourselves till we have the means to live respectably.

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.