The reading of these speeches added much to my limited stock of language, and enabled me to give tongue to many interesting thoughts, which had frequently flashed through my soul, and died away for want of utterance.
Douglass explains how reading the speeches in 'The Columbian Orator' provided him with the vocabulary and rhetorical tools to articulate his own thoughts on freedom.
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None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.
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.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.