Frederick Douglass: “May He not, for wise ends, have doomed me to this lot?”

The laws which determine the destinies of individuals and nations are impartial and eternal.

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

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.

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.